The Long Game
by randolhllee
Summary: What would POI look like from Root's point of view? A canon-compliant exploration of her character and an attempt to explain the mysteries from her first appearance on.
1. Chapter 1

I've finally gotten back to this fic! Basically, it'll be a Root-centric story that fills in what we don't get to see/know in the show. Right now, I'm intending it to be canon-compliant, so any deviations are unintentional unless otherwise noted. If you read the first chapter I posted back in December, I think it's now going to be Ch. 4, so it may be confusing for a couple weeks until I get Chs. 2 and 3 up. Please bear with me!

This chapter encompasses the events of "Root Cause" (1.13). I've tried to give enough information from the episode so that it's clear what Root is doing, but all the references will probably make more sense if you've seen the episode. Enjoy!

* * *

The woman with many names and an ever-changing face strode up to the plain dorm building, wheeling her smart black suitcase behind her. She wove smoothly between students rushing to shuffle their patchwork duffle bags into waiting caravans before the parking meters ran out, desperate to fall into familiar beds and let the semester's knowledge disappear under Christmas snowdrifts. She caught the door before it closed behind another teenager running mad to escape the so-called hallowed halls.

A woman with a suitcase, even one in her thirties, did not attract much attention from the frantic students. One, however, did notice that the woman, though beautiful, seemed to be alone, withdrawn and inscrutable within her deep hood. Had she looked closer, she would have seen that the woman's sweatshirt was indeed of that university, but still had creases from the campus bookstore shelves; that she was not, in fact, attached or connected in any way to any of the retreating students; and that she avoided the steady gaze of the security cameras with the ease of someone who has planned to do exactly that. The student, however, noted only that the woman was a small anomaly in the painfully plain corridor before succumbing to the siren whisper of a home, two hours' drive in her future, in which she could sleep without alarm clocks. She was certainly long gone by the time the hooded woman exited the elevator on the fifth floor, located an empty room, and swiftly picked the lock before finally stepping inside and freeing her head and long, brown hair from the confines of the sweatshirt.

She smirked to herself. That was all the audience she ever needed.

Hours chased themselves down to tired nubs and returned to the room as puddling shadows casting themselves across the industrial carpet. They drifted past the woman working steadily at the wooden desk and fell into the grime-swiped cracks between the cramped room's institutional furnishings.

She had pushed the whimsical clutter of a teenage girl's attempt at stylish study methods to the floor. That leveled the space into a smooth plane, full of opportunity, upon which she could place the tools of her craft.

She had honed her talents until the intricate whorls and hauntingly beautiful veins of a beating system flowed from her hands in smooth strings of numbers and letters, a cat's-cradle of information spun between her fingertips. Over years, the spinning patterns grew in complexity, though they never outpaced her controlling touch. She had grown her playground into an empire over the years, but as its ruler, she and she alone played there.

The beating tattoo of her black-tipped fingers striking the keyboard formed the soundtrack to her work. With flicks of her fingers she spun a spiraling trail of hints and tiny lies down into the life of one bumbling being. A gun license here, a series of encrypted emails there, a search history to do a black-ops recruit proud scattered throughout. She was particularly pleased with the trojan program she had designed to be delivered by email. Nearly any fool could write a trojan, but it took an artist to create an elegant program. The best part was that the mark had installed the program himself when he replied to the email.

All these had been set up over the last months, of course, or dated in such a way as to seem so. These things took time, and she was a master of the long game.

* * *

The shadows had long since circled the room and settled in for the night when her phone buzzed.

"Hello?" she answered sweetly.

"Is it ready?" a nervous voice rasped.

The honey in her voice did nothing to dull the edge it slashed through the air.

"It's been ready. We've discussed this before, you know," she reminded the Congressman's campaign manager with the air of a kindergarten teacher speaking to a particularly stubborn child.

"I just want to be sure," was the disgruntled reply. "I pay you enough for that, don't I?"

"You pay me enough to have me take care of your problems," she answered in a bored tone. "But you don't pay me enough to keep cleaning up when you create new ones. Like this call, for example."

The businessman turned frantic. "You said this was a secure line to call," he accused shakily.

"It is," she sighed. "But that just means that no one can find out _who_ you called. They'll still know you called an untraceable number, if they check."

"Fix it!" The order was a dying shudder of bravado and fraying nerves. Some people were just not built for this game.

She rolled her eyes and tapped her long fingers carelessly on the desk in a slow rhythm.

"Oh, I will," she drawled. "_Once_."

Then she hung up. The phone had not even stopped transcribing glinting circles on the desk when the plastic _tap_ of the keys once again slipped around the room.

* * *

She dozed periodically, both on the bed and in the strict desk chair; she ate irregularly whenever hunger overtook her malaise. She monitored the development of her strategy as a general from base, watching the far-off flashes that signal gun-fire. Soft _pings_ interrupted her other projects, alerting her to the finding of the planted emails, the discovery of the gun permit, and everything else she had planned so meticulously. She could have placed a time-estimate on every alert, but betting against herself was pointlessly boring in the face of her certainty.

And then, a _ping_ she did not expect. A louder one, an alarm set long ago against a dim possibility.

She studied the screen for a moment before once again grinning. It seemed that there was a pretender to the throne of her kingdom. Of course, entering her empire of mirrors meant that one had to see the mirages coming.

The shadow system absorbed the intruder's search and pulled it into a dark hole to chase ghosts. Meanwhile, the hacker directed her attention to the information arriving on her screen in scrolling strings of code. Though it streamed by with the volume and force of an enormous river, she picked out several strings she had never seen before, and she had seen it all. Moreover, it carried within it an artistry and elegance that twined close to her own. It hardly matched the agitated voice she heard exclaiming, "they're listening to us right now, destroy your phone!" But then, she was so rarely what people expected either. It was really an advantage.

Even as her program unceremoniously kicked the errant thief out on his ear, she had become absorbed in the graceful and gripping numbers gleaned from the attacker's computer. Her lips curled into the irrepressible beam of a child absorbed in a new toy. _This _was far from boring.

* * *

Another call from the Congressman's campaign manager, now that her perfectly balanced strategy had been skewed by unpredictable variables. More threats, more pointed this time, and he backed off. Still, his call itched at the back of her throat.

The issues he raised, though, were far from annoying; they were welcome. She sat up straight with renewed energy, typed with a force and purpose that had drifted away from her fingers in the last few years. She had forgotten that it was more fun to play with an equal, but now she remembered.

Her relocation was inconvenient, but not more than slightly irksome. It was not as if she had ever unpacked more than her equipment, nor left traces that would be of any help. She disappeared as she had come, a tall, faceless figure wheeling a suitcase down an empty hallway. And if the security video from those days were mysteriously and precisely corrupted, it was only a usual precaution.

The whole strategy was thrown off, but she swiftly constructed a new one. She tested it and its components for weaknesses, but found none. The objective had changed, of course; where before, she had been aiming to complete the job, now she was trying for closure on her part in it. The rest of the team she had arranged would have to fend for themselves, but then, it was their job to become the same color as the shadows. The client, on the other hand, was less… adaptable. He would have to be abandoned.

She tied the strings of that last job with neat flourishes of code and tactics from a quiet coffee shop in Queens; she was particularly proud of the suicide note. It was not easy to get these things right remotely, but she had chosen her disposable team as carefully as she chose any of her other tools. With a final tap, the last elements fell into place, leaving behind a smooth, impenetrable facade walling up all proof that she had ever been involved.

And then, as a reward, she opened a new window and sent the opening gambit for her newest game.

_Opening IRC Chat IP Port 96 on … user 'anonymous'_

_ HELLO_

_ FBI PAID ME A VISIT. GOOD THING I TRAVEL LIGHT..._

She typed with the same easy precision that characterized all her operations. The force, though, the power she held in her fingers, had been renewed by this intriguing adversary.

_ WHO ARE YOU?_

A very direct adversary, then. No finesse, no slow approach. She could still work with that.

_ MY NAME? I'VE HAD A FEW. YOU CAN CALL ME ROOT._

That was the proud appellation connected by whispers and conjecture to dozens of jobs she had completed, some with blood spilled and others mere money operations. All neat, though, airtight and perfect, like ships in glass bottles built of her wondrous manipulations.

_DID YOU KILL MATHESON?_

Her lips quirked at the question. It was imprecise, and therefore deserved an indirect answer.

_MATHESON WAS A CASUALTY OF HIS OWN WEAKNESS._

An involuntary muscle contraction flared her nostrils. Matheson had been a particularly dense example of the average human being. Sometimes, when dispatching other obstructions to the smooth flow of her projects, it had crossed her mind that another woman, a lesser woman, might have felt remorse for the action. In Matheson's case, not even this sneering commentary on human weakness crossed her mind. Not even a lesser woman would have hesitated to kill _him_.

_WHY DID YOU CONTACT ME?_

A slightly more interesting question. In common parlance, her new toy was taking the bait. Now to set the hook.

First, flattery.

_I WANTED TO ACKNOWLEDGE A WORTHY OPPONENT. _

Then, a challenge.

_AND SAY I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME…_

Finally, dominance.

_… HAROLD._

_[CONNECTION TERMINATED]_

* * *

Well, there's chapter 1! This is the longest and most complex fic I've ever undertaken, so I need feedback more than ever. Please drop me a review with likes/dislikes/questions/etc., I would love to hear from you!


	2. Chapter 2

_This chapter takes place in the latter half of season one, between February and April of 2012. It begins directly after the end of the previous chapter._

_BEAR WITH ME: If you read this work before, there was another chapter up previously that I have replaced with this one. The one you read before, with Root in Bishop, will go up again, but as Chapter 4. Please excuse the temporary confusion._

* * *

The first taxi she flagged down after exiting the quaint little coffee shop was the standard black-and-yellow workhorse that flavored New York's gritty streets with an unmistakable spice of cigarette smoke and stale rain. That driver, a Dominican with a penchant for hip hop, took her as far as Rockefeller Center. She crossed the bustling square and conjured up another ride with a confident wave of her hand. She followed that pattern of zig-zag travel on auto-pilot, her mind occupied with thoughts of her newest playmate.

He was clever, no doubt; most casual hackers could not have found her work in the first place, much less worried at the faint trail until it led them to her honeypot. Clever was fun. But why had he started looking at her work in the—

"Hey, lady, stop here?"

Questioning brown eyes found her own suddenly alert ones in the rearview mirror.

"Here's fine."

'Here' was a slushy, cramped corner on the edge of a hurry-up-and-don't-make-eye-contact sort of neighborhood. 'Here' ended her ersatz commute, just a short walk from the apartment in which she stashed her less mobile possessions.

All records attached to the place linked back to Mary Lorenz, a travel writer who penned short reviews of East Coast hostels and B&amp;Bs for an internet-based travel company. Root ensured with a few simple algorithms that business boomed; it was a shame, really, that their phone line was always busy and their tours always fully booked.

The fairy-tale reviews, spun out at odd hours for her own odd amusement, explained frequent absences and a meager income that covered simple meals, a weak Wi-fi signal, and this run-down apartment in a building that happened to sit directly on top of a transatlantic communications cable. The heavy volume of goings-on transmitted through the cable washed away her more egregious electronic sins and afforded her needed anonymity.

Stepping out of the cab into Mary Lorenz's life transformed her; her shoulders grew rounded, her smile meeker, and she stepped timidly down Mary's block with the cautious surety of a shy woman who nominally belonged there. She kept her head down all the way up through stairwells that buzzed with fluorescent light and down the hall to her door.

She did not even bother to flick on the depressingly dingy lights that punctuated the smoke-stained ceiling. Instead, she found her way by memory and gloomy silhouettes to the kitchen, abandoning her suitcase as she went. Three minutes of humming radiation later, she slurped at hot instant noodles and settled cross-legged on the battered sofa to power up the small array of computer screens that graced her secondhand coffee table.

* * *

She often worked from public places, or other locations with no link to her, but new uncertainty prompted by her latest obsession had her circling the city in a never-ending cycle of criss-crossing cab journeys and steaming coffee in disposable cups. The background changed frequently over the course of the next two months, but the foreground was always the same: her fingers tapping out a drumbeat rhythm that marshaled the letters and numbers onto the screen in neat rows as she pursued her burning questions. The same screen lit her face in a true communion, a oneness she had never found anywhere else.

She worked methodically, beginning with the origin of the breach to her system. All points of contact made on this job, from the slightest brush of her electronic self against the smooth steel walls of a guarded database to the physical presence she had embodied in that cramped dorm room, filed through her head like targets for a firing squad. She ignored phone calls, cancelled a job she had already been contracted for, and turned all her time toward answers. Hour piled on hour as she shot possibilities down one by one over the course of a full week, carefully ticking them off against the likelihood that each scruffy, pathetic thread had been the one that lead Harold stumbling blindly to her computer.

His attack was cautious, with a finesse that made it more exploration than foray. His style was distinctive, certainly, but still she found her cursor drifting away from this line of inquiry. Conventional wisdom might have advised the pursuit of the individual, even if she only had a name and a few fragmented files, but an inexorable obsession circled her back around to a larger question: what had alerted Harold to her in the first place? How had he known exactly where to look in the life of an unemployed temp worker in order to pull out a Congressman's assassination plot?

This, then, became the subject of her tireless scrutiny for days. The everyday safeguards on her computers had obviously been compromised, yet each successive search yielded no point of ingress. The violation was not in her own machines, then, but elsewhere. This conclusion, this dangerous omniscience, pushed her back into her borrowed lecture-hall seat-of-the-day. After that, coffee shops and libraries flickered rapidly in and out of focus behind her computer screen, masking her inquiries behind hidden IP addresses.

* * *

One dreary March afternoon found her folded up in a poorly-polished wooden chair at yet another library, seated amidst a grab-bag readers, students, and other presumably reputable citizens.

She pushed back in her chair and stretched her arms up, out, down, gracefully rolling her neck until her energy started to flow again. Her fingers tapped a light staccato on the table-stop as she thought. The Congressman hit hung suspended before her mind's eye, a tangle of knots with ends that extended to unknown places, with too many possibilities. It was a tangle of her own creation, though, and therefore she saw it in its clearest form. Someone else, though…

She saw it as a carefully knotted series of connections, artfully tied so as to make it seem impossible for events to be anything but an accident. That was what she excelled at. But then, another might use a different metaphor: a chord. Root as musician, arranger of fingers and pedals and stops, all for the creation of a single, fleeting chorus. In order to predict the chord, then, one would have to watch either the musician or all the tools at once. The first option was not possible, weeks of chasing each byte to its bitter end proved that. The second seemed even more far-fetched, even if it was the simplest explanation.

Root had little respect for Occam's Razor. After all, she had built a shifting maze kingdom on ensuring that the simplest explanation was whatever falsehood she wished it to be. This time, though… this time the simplest answer was more exhilarating than anything she could have conjured herself: someone, or something, with the power to watch everything at once.

* * *

She emerged from the echoing electronic well of her thoughts in response to a polite cough originating behind her.

"I'm sorry, dear, I'm going to have to ask you to mute your computer. That dinging noise is distracting our readers."

Root masked irritation with a simper as she turned to face the interloper. It was an older woman with grey-blue hair and the requisite sweater and glasses chain of her ilk.

"No problem," she replied gaily. "I'm sorry to have bothered you." The elderly woman gave her a self-righteous little smile and shuffled off, no doubt to nitpick someone else's behavior. Root's face dropped its smile suddenly, leaving only a hard, blank expression as she turned her attention back to the screen.

Through her strange communion with the digital world, she had learned to parse humans into code and use her electronic half to find their secrets. Much like the commands she marshaled to the screen, nature too coded with loops, with if-else statements, with repetition. If she was to find this new omniscience, she would have to look for the patterns it could see. She spent days plucking these hidden patterns from their surroundings, holding them up, turning them around, studying them, learning them. Using them.

She began with her single data point, the Congressman's assassination, but she built from there, skillfully drawing the barest filaments and estimates out until a spun-sugar pattern grew and solidified on her screen. The mirage of barely-there connections hid a delicate reality; some pattern underlay the whole thing, watching passively over terabytes of data until it found fingers poised in a dozen places to strike a dangerous chord.

It oversaw the entire city and beyond, spilling across neighboring states and farther, though she left the exact determination of borders for a later date.

The beauty and complexity of this shadow pattern stole her usual focus, stilling her black-tipped fingers and derailing her thoughts at each fleeting glimpse of what she sought. Somewhere in the random static of trillions of bytes of data, the lowest humming tune, the barest flowing line, these were all that showed what might truly exist there. There was no source code, though, only traces of some program rather than the program itself. This was not the showy flash of a new hacker, though, or the error-ridden brute force of some new and supposedly sophisticated software. This was beauty and grace and life; this was power.

* * *

If the program watched, then it depended on Harold and his annoying friend to act. The first solid result linking back to them came in early April; it was only a fifty-eight percent match to the overall pattern she had developed, and it was months old, but it fit. It was clumsy, perhaps an early effort, a girl thought to be dead brought back to life and caught up in a shady land deal. Unexplained interferences, impossible coincidences—accounting for pattern development over time, the match was closer to eighty-six percent, a close match for a first result.

She skimmed eager eyes over the web of matches that began to crop up as her pattern predictions improved. The information came from a variety of sources: police records, newspaper articles, blog posts, and the like. Many of the incidents appeared unrelated, but they spider-webbed together in back-linking loops of faint connections and habits. In fact, it was similar to the way that she was wont to work, with disjointed events making up a whole result. A damning one, in her case. The difference between Harold and her was their purpose, as well as a certain lack of subtlety that seemed to originate with Harold's partner. Root had certainly never sought the attention called by ramming into cars with semis.

One she uncovered the FBI investigation and Detective Carter's notes, the rest slotted into place. The Man in the Suit acted publicly for Harold, who in turn stood in front of some unknown power.

The power, that omniscience, akin to a god, had to be the source of their information. The tangled net of data in each case unraveled into a giant loop with no loose end for her to tug. Each sequence of events emerged from an infinite past only to be brought to heel by Harold and his friend, and it did not originate with them.

Once she had familiarized herself with his movements and actions, Harold's files were not quite as puzzling as they seemed at first glance. The most heavily protected of them were also the ones that intrigued her most. She cracked her back languidly before opening these as they finished loading from the program cobbling the fragments back together. Though her self-written program had never failed her before, the strings that emerged were far from normal.

It was not simply the beauty of the code that materialized; it was what the code would do. There were test runs and works-in-progress, the saved remnants of an old project. Root's breath was shallow and even the automatic part of her brain forgot to blink in the dry institutional air of yet another Starbucks.

If this worked, if this had been completed, it would explain everything.

She stared for hours at the scrolling numbers, until finally a disgruntled teen worker at her shoulder pulled her out of her soft reverie. She closed her computer reluctantly and wandered out of the coffee shop into dark spring streets. Her thoughts stole the power of sight with distraction, and she ambled by memory back to Mary Lorenz's apartment, consumed with questions about the world's newest god.

* * *

She did not sleep at all that night; she sat slumped at her computer, alternately staring at the streetlight through her single grimy window or at her glowing screen.

Once she knew what she was looking for, it was almost laughably easy to locate the huge streams of data flowing out of the NSA and into the ether. The hidden budgets for black-ops programs were a little more difficult, but that was only a matter of time and due diligence. It should not be possible. A half-dozen incomplete government projects, from Trailblazer to Stellar Wind to TIA, proved that. But everything she had found said it existed—an all-powerful program, written by an artist of coding. Trapped and declawed by the same artist, too; that was the only scenario she could imagine to explain why such an omniscient program would watch and wait in near-silence.

Names started to emerge—Denton Weeks, Alicia Corwin; a one-dollar payment for 'The Machine' that gave god a name—but nothing definite enough to go on. Harold would have to be the way in. She sipped at lukewarm black coffee as she scanned her pattern predictions for the interference of Harold and his pet. They all shared some detectable danger, something the Machine could latch onto and predict.

She looked out the window, mind whirring as she switched from research to planning. The poking fingers of dawn grasping at the sills found her unmoved, too occupied with planning her own assassination to sleep.

* * *

_I'm super-nervous about this, so any and all constructive criticism, suggestions, or thoughts on what you thought worked and what didn't are hugely appreciated!_


	3. Chapter 3

Sharp winds stopped their keening and dwindled down to soft spring breezes, though the concrete body of the city barely noticed. The snow piles melted, spread, and shrank away to dryness; smatterings of green struggled their way to the forefront of city parks and nervously edged swanky avenues, hoping to escape the swatting notice of the stone and brick beings that ruled New York.

On a morning in the midst of this yearly ritual, Caroline Turing passed the urban battle of trees and concrete without a sideways glance. She rounded the sharp brick corner of the bank onto a bustling Broadway and dug in her large leather handbag for the key to her shiny new P.O. box as she approached the post office. The carefully-appointed interior merited only a glance; all her attention was fixed on fitting the key into the lock. And there it was.

She closed and locked the box absently while turning the envelope back and forth in her hand, admiring it with interested regard, as if it were expected and welcome. The door swung shut behind the pronounced tapping of high heels on cement, but Caroline Turing's eyes never left the envelope as she deftly slit it open with a clear-coated nail.

There was something about a brand new Social Security card, something sharp and full of promise. Root rose to the surface for a moment to brush her finger over the raised blue print and stamped red number. 271-43-5219. The code to life contained in ten numbers, in a manner of speaking. Caroline Turing's life, anyway.

The real thing had not been much of a comparison, in any case. Root had honed in on her best options, searching first for women about her age, deceased, with college loans on the books. Bonus points for few digital records, even more for few personal connections, and triple score for those who had also originated in a small town. She carved away at hundreds of women, crossing them off with sharp taps of her capable fingers. In the end, there were a half-dozen golden opportunities; when she glimpsed the name Turing, though, she quirked an eyebrow. If she had ever believed in a higher power than herself, she would have known then that God had a sense of humor.

A few miles away and days later, an older man shifted slightly. His hands pushed the pockets of his leather jacket forward in an aggressive indicator of his boredom. His legs braced wide in scuffed boots on concrete and gravel, but the younger man's gloved hand never trembled as he held out his delivery. The cop rocked back, chin raised, and regarded the envelope being extended toward him. Finally, he breathed heavily, quickly from his nose and grabbed at the papers.

"Just dead, or you want information?" he asked briefly. He scanned his eyes over the documents and photos.

"Just dead."

"When?"

His contact tilted his head, eyes unreadable behind mirrored lenses.

"What's your usual?"

The cop thought for a moment, tucking his tongue behind sharp teeth and tapping his forefinger along the edge of the largest photo.

"Gimme two weeks."

"One."

Simmons looked up sharply.

"Ten days."

"We've already done the surveillance." The younger man's quiet tone belied his argumentative words.

Simmons laughed, a hard, harsh sound.

"You think this is good surveillance?" he asked mockingly. "This," he continued, shaking the papers, "is barely worth the paper it's printed on. I'm going to have to have my guys tailing her for a couple days, off and on, 'fore we can do anything. Ten days minimum."

"Fine."

"Half now, half after," Simmons demanded.

"Ten percent now," the younger man drawled.

Simmons thrust the papers back into his hands.  
"Tell your boss I ain't gonna work under these conditions," he ordered sardonically. "And don't think I don't know which Councilman you work for."

The man appeared suitably chagrined. He pulled another envelope from inside his jacket, this one soft around the edges and fat with cash.

"I only have ten percent now."

"Then I guess you'll have to drop the rest before I can guarantee anything, huh?" Simmons raised his arms in a wide shrug as he stepped away. "Nice talking to you."

The shorter man watched him stride away and turn the corner before he fished an old phone from his pocket and pressed one on speed dial.

"Yeah. It's done. Ten days."

He did not even hang up, just tossed the phone further into the alley behind him before he sauntered away. On the other end, Root heard the clatter as it skittered to a halt on the uneven concrete, and she grinned. All the pieces were nearly in place.

Just after that phone call, Root stepped out of her new apartment into the thrum of New York. Her gaze was fixed on an invisible point somewhere ahead of her, a point that perhaps did not exactly exist in the physical world. So little of her did, really; just a body, not a bad one, but with all the limitations presented therein. To be Caroline Turing, though, she had to ground herself, and that meant paying attention.

So she looked; she absorbed; she engaged. Stopping at coffee shops and waiting in line, glancing at her phone in boredom, passing the time eating or reading in public places: all were foreign practice to Root's life, but this was Caroline Turing, who made a habit of venturing out to drive away the mocking isolation that gleamed off the perfectly polished surfaces in her trendy apartment.

As Caroline Turing lived, Root observed. She had not done this for years; generally speaking, her attentions in a public place were directed towards her computer, or an unsuspecting victim. This, this was low-quality entertainment; this was boundless boredom in an ever-moving parade of predictability.

There was the dowdy professional in an ill-fitting suit, probably a lawyer, sitting at the cafe table across the courtyard, who did not make eye contact with anyone for the full hour that she sat there. Then there was the college student who gallantly waved Dr. Turing ahead of him in line at the coffee shop with a bowing incline of his home-cropped head. Each one briefly flickered into focus out of the thousands of nameless, faceless, useless people that passed her by everyday, dusted in shades of grey and navy straight out of a blues-tracked depressive daydream. Root's nightmare, Caroline Turing's everyday life.

Caroline Turing looked everyone in the eye, not to make them uncomfortable, but to reassure them that she was paying attention. She stopped to pick up the change dropped by that old man when she was walking past the park, and smiled beautifully when he called her 'sweetheart.' She sat with legs crossed at the ankle and always leaned forward a little, said 'thank you' and 'please' at regular intervals whether they were warranted by the conversation or not.

The one thing Caroline Turing did not do was have friends. At that Root drew the line. And there was something mysterious, wasn't there, about a woman so completely alone in the world? Even intriguing, perhaps, to a man like Harold Finch. A kindred spirit. From the glimpses of his sidekick that she began to catch around the city, trailing behind her like a lollopping puppy with a vigilante's demeanor, Harold was alone too. If that was his closest companion, he had to be yearning for real conversation. It was not likely that Harold would become involved with her number directly, although a few wrenches thrown into the works would quickly complicate things past the point of his non-involvement. Root held her hand there. Meeting Harold would be so much more rewarding as herself.

And so, for now, she remained alone. Dead drops and directions left in untraceable and above all non-digital envelopes arranged Dr. Turing's 'clients,' and those directions in turn resulted in a clear message on anonymous posts dotted through the internet. Caroline Turing was treating the rich and powerful of New York for their minor peccadilloes. She provided the best security for secrets that money could buy: a friend, bought and paid for. Her secretary, a middle-aged temp named Joan, looked perplexed when Dr. Turing instructed her not to take in any new clients.

"Don't you want- I mean, you have some clients but if this is a new practice-"

"It is," Dr. Turing interjected softly. "I'm just working on a special project, so I can't take on many new clients right now."

"But-" The older woman lowered her voice as if the spacious office contained a throng of nosy people. "Councilwoman Stewart's office called yesterday!"

Root placed a reassuring hand over Joan's.

"It's sweet of you to worry." She smiled and patted Joan's hand. "Let me know when my ten o'clock arrives."

She stepped back into her office, closing her door quietly as she went. Just Caroline Turing here, occupying just a little less space than everyone else, making just a little less noise. And as one, Caroline Turing and Root sat down to wait.

It took extra care to ensure that she was untraceable, but Root had some errands to run. Far away from Caroline Turing's insular life, she strode into an anonymous-looking self-storage facility. Fluorescent lights buzzed and popped over the clicking of her heels on the smooth cement floor. Shining tracks of light reflected off the industrial metal roll doors as she passed, ushering her further and further into the cheap geometric maze. The man that tread on before her slid his head around to check that she was still behind him. She gave him the hard smile of an uncaring higher power, one that might spare him a slow death only because she could not be bothered to waste her more elaborate torture techniques on him. His eyes jerked to the floor beside her, as if he had really been interested in the shiny Yale lock adorning the bottom of the door at which he had stopped.

"It's, uh, it's this one." He indicated the door with a pale finger swung out in a vain attempt to direct her gaze away from himself. He smeared his sweaty palms down his canvas shorts, then nearly dropped the ring of keys he pulled out of his pocket. The keys clanged noisily against the corrugated metal door when he caught at the dirty navy lanyard on which they swung.

"What did you say the problem was?" he inquired nervously, nearly running into one of the metal shelving units. He caught himself on a metal bar and brushed past, rasping his hand across a cardboard box. "I mean, I thought it turned out okay, you know? Was it the photo? 'Cause no one looks good in those, you know?" He coughed out a nervous laugh and shrugged to a stop by the jumble-topped desk. "I dunno, just-"

"It was fine, Owen," Root assured him. She put a hand up and leaned against a metal shelf, the picture of a predator feigning rest. "Just one minor problem." She frowned sympathetically.

"I can fix it!" he rushed to tell her. "I mean, did you bring it? If you have the card I can-"

"I'd prefer to take care of it myself." Root smiled indulgently. "It's better that way."

Owen's anxious smile twitched away.

"Okay, then- I'm sorry, but- so what do you need?" he asked desperately.

"Did you get the payment I sent?" Her solicitous inquiry confused him.

"Um, yeah- I guess? Yeah, I did," he answered certainly, as soon as his mind caught up to his mouth. "Yeah, it's all good." He made a sweeping motion with his hands. "We're good."

"Could you check for me?" Root asked sweetly. "I just want to make sure everything's-" She paused, as if thinking about the right word to use. "-settled."

"Um, yeah." Owen nodded emphatically. "Just let me-" He gestured behind him and swung the chair around to pull his computer open.

Though Root's shoes had made plenty of ominous noise on her way in, they were silent now. Any faint noise she made was covered by Owen's enthusiastic typing.

"Yeah, it's all here," he informed her. "We're all-"

The stun gun cut off his words sharply. His hands came up an inch off the table, shaking in midair as his body took on more amperage than it was meant to. Root kept the gun pressed against the underside of his jaw a few seconds longer than was technically necessary.

When she pulled her hand away, she ignored Owen's body slumping to the desktop, his hand smacking down hard on the keyboard. Instead, she inspected the stun gun carefully. Her confidence in her home-engineered modifications could not be shaken, but it never hurt to be sure. And there was always the risk of overheating, even with new wiring. A self-satisfied half-smile grew on her face, and she tucked the taser back into her jacket pocket. Much better than a gun; no bloody patterns on her clothes to give her away. She liked that jacket too much to burn it, and the smoke always attracted too much attention for her taste.

Wide-drawn curtains framed a grey-blue stage upon which the day's psychological drama unraveled. Dr. Turing's eyes followed Hans as he paced around the room, practically ranting about her lack of confidentiality. The man seemed genuinely angry, an impressive feat for a scripted emotion. She held herself carefully, as if intensely aware that she should be standing her ground while not quite resisting the instinct to shrink away from the potential source of pain. Her face crumpled in concern, both for herself and for her patient.

"I'm sorry, but in order to help you, I have to have your trust. Clearly I don't. I'm referring you to another therapist." Her back was to the window. She straightened her shoulders visibly, although they slowly relaxed back into themselves a moment later. Dr. Turing was not completely passive, but physical assertion was also not her strong suit. Her fingers curled around her pen in fear as Hans reacted.

"You're firing me?" He exploded around to face her. Inside, Root applauded. Outwardly, Dr. Turing shrank back a stuttered step behind her desk.

"No, I- I'm admitting failure. I'm firing myself. You have issues to resolve, and you need to be able to speak freely."

"And I'm just supposed to take that lying down?" he exploded.

"I'm going to have to ask you to leave," she pressed. At the press of a button under her desk, Joan appeared stolidly at the door.

"Sir?" she inquired. "Would you come with me?"

"Now you're calling back-up? How long has she been listening?" Hans spat.

"Hans..." Dr. Turing sighed. "Please. It's for the best."

She sank into her chair as Joan supervised Hans's stomping out of the office. She remained there until Joan returned with a soft knock, staring at the scribbled initials on her desk calendar.

"Are you all right, Dr. Turing?" Joan asked. Her kind voice was laced through with concern.

"Yes," Dr. Turing answered decidedly, flicking her eyes up to meet Joan's. "I think I'll take an early day, though."

"Of course," Joan emphathized. "I'll lock up, if you want to leave now."

Dr. Turing shook her head. "No, that's kind, but you go first," she offered. "I want to collect my thoughts."

Her eyes followed Joan's back as she exited, and she sank deep into her office chair. Her gaze fixed itself just past the corner of her desk, her eyes unfocused, and a slight frown froze on her face.

Tense muscles hid a body that wanted to expand, to claim the space around her, to look out the window at directly into the small black lenses that had watche the whole thing. Her skin was the most minimal of barriers, barely holding onto Caroline Turing as Root rejoiced underneath.

Her mind whirred even as her body remained motionless; her posture still resembled a soft-spoken and currently somewhat defeated doctor, but her mind screamed to know if Harold had seen, if he pitied Caroline, if he could see himself in her vacant life and hear himself in her quiet tone.

Dr. Turing stood beside her office door, watching John Rooney's broad back retreat down the hallway to the elevator. He turned to look at her when he reached the doors, and she smiled before shutting her own door and walking slowly back into her office.

The session had gone well, in Root's opinion. She depressed the button that controlled the window-shades and waited for them to whir all the way down before sinking into her desk chair to consider her next moves. The camera John had undoubtedly planted, if that was even his real name, was likely directed toward the couch. After all, a threat to a meek psychiatrist who treated New York's upper echelons most likely came from her clients. There was no reason to see how she sat behind her desk, how her smirk grew to reveal dangerous teeth and a savagely sweet gaze.

Root tipped her head back to smile at the ceiling, her head light with energy that had no outlet but frenetic thought. That idiot was so accustomed to slipping in and out of aliases that he had forgotten other people could do it too. But a woman, without physical strength? Impossible to visualize in the dim corners of his mind, apparently. There had been others just as stupid, and most likely would be many more, but it seemed a pity that Harold's brilliantly dangerous mind should be accompanied by an unimaginative musclebound flunky.

He had been fun to taunt, though. She'd have to be careful of that. Each comment was painfully low-hanging fruit, as it were, but still, even if John did not realize, Harold was listening, and Harold might.

Root raised her wrist to glance at Caroline's dainty watch. Nearly seven; time for Dr. Turing to walk to the subway station alone in the dark.

The next hour rushed by in a blur of excitement and the satisfaction of perfectly orchestrated chaos. Root allowed herself to be rescued and led around as if she were helpless, but she could hardly keep a smirk from lighting up her face. It was not until they reached the hotel room that she had time to think, but by then, there was very little that had not already been planned down to the smallest contingency.

Root sat on the couch and appeared suitably shocked and confused as John barked into his earpiece, but her face quickly relaxed to mere alertness. She felt like a child on Christmas Eve, and chafed at the assumed identity keeping her from embodying her excitement. It was hardly even worth being Caroline anymore; John's idiotic comment about the chocolate proved that.

She stared at John as if in mild shock, but her mind went speeding on. It was clear just from his side of the conversation that two fronts were colliding, the FBI she had noticed trailing far behind Harold and his pet and HR. The only remaining question was how destructive the coming storm was to be. This was even better than the minimum Root had counted on; it was so convenient, though, that in addition to the danger she had provided in the form of HR, the Man in the Suit had finally been tracked down. It was lucky they'd never met him, Root thought dispassionately. Then they'd be much less keen to track him down.

Finally, finally, as the FBI and HR moved in, she had her chance to leave him behind.

"John, thank you." The large man smiled a little, simply happy to be shielding an innocent with his own body. Root did not need to put Caroline on for even a moment in those last moments; her gratitude was genuine. It was not every day she was given clear instructions to find her waiting target.

Root's muscles sang with exertion and perhaps stress as she clambered down the ladder. She rested her hands after her feet reached the ground and peered up, encouraged by the gunshots still echoing down. She could only wait a moment before impatience spurred her on down the tunnel, out to the tempting light and what she knew waited there.

"This comes out to a water treatment plant by the river. Keep going till you find my friend." His words matched what she already expected, having memorized the plans to several of Harold's safe-houses in the area to prepare. She'd also arranged to have sets of clothing stashed in various convenient places, as she anticipated wanting to be as far from Caroline Turing as possible while meeting Harold. Wasteful, perhaps; she'd never get the other clothes back. She quickly stripped off the last of Caroline's cloying professional wear and donned her own jacket. One last tug on the pins securing her hair and the psychiatrist ebbed away, leaving Root with her phone in her hand. It was freeing to have the use of her technology again; at this point, there was nothing the Machine could do to warn Harold about her, not with the way he'd chained it.

That had been particularly galling, even though it had helped her immeasurably. If Harold only knew that the numbers were either victim or criminal, he could never see around the dim clues and mirrors to the fact that Caroline Turing was the threat. Root had been careful, certainly, but nothing escaped the eye of God. Only the box placed around the Machine at birth kept Root safe, but that would end; she'd be speaking to Harold about that.

Soon. Now, in fact. She emerged from the tunnel and onto the concrete bordering the water. A car sat parked yards away, and inside, two people. Harold and... someone else. Root hung back for a moment to observe a stunned Harold arguing with an increasingly disturbed woman. She considered them, but against the pantheic backdrop of an all-seeing God in a cage, no one could be that important. Without hesitation, Root strode forward, pulled the silenced gun she'd tucked into her waistband, aimed, and pulled.

She caught the tail-end of Harold's horrified stare as she slid into the car, but then he had an inexplicable fondness for people. It might make him less inclined to listen to her at first, but he was too perfectly rational to do so forever. She grinned her excitement.

"I thought she'd never shut up." Harold looked even more sick, if that were possible. Root's Cheshire grin grew wider. "So nice to finally meet you, Harold."


	4. Chapter 4

Takes place just after Firewall (1.23) and during The Contingency (2.01).

This is the real new chapter as of 14 Nov 2015! One more round of this backwards updating and then we'll be all set. Again, I apologize that this happened. I'm very unorganized. But faster to update this time! Next chapter should be up next week-ish, and then we'll be done with this weird updating style that came about because I started writing in the middle.

Also, all the thanks to lazyroughdrafts, who is The Best™.

Enjoy!

* * *

"Pull over." Root spoke softly, trusting the light gesture she made with the pistol to convince Harold. He gave her a sidelong glance and obeyed. Their tires scraped across Jersey City gravel and slowed to a cautious stall behind a parked sedan. "Get out."

Harold unfolded warily from the seat. He glanced around as if testing theories of escape, but deflated minutely when he met Root's smiling eyes. She tucked her gun away. Only ten minutes after meeting, and already they understood each other.

"That one." Root gestured to the car in front of them. When Harold limped over to the passenger side, she shook her head. "Why don't you drive, Harold?" He glared. "I'm sorry. I know it probably hurts your leg. You'll just have to drive faster. Promise we'll stop to stretch," she simpered.

Without a word, Harold walked to the opposite side of the car and stood still, hands dangling listlessly from the sleeves of his customary suit jacket. The tweed was looking a little rumpled, but overall, he might have been a professor driving home to one of the smaller hamlets that hung from New York's apron strings.

"Let me," Root offered solicitously. After pulling a set of keys out of her back pocket, she unlocked the door, yanked it open, and leaned on it. Harold stared at her for a moment longer before climbing stiffly into the driver's seat.

When Root settled into the worn upholstery of the passenger seat, Harold was still sitting exactly as he had come to rest moments before: hands in his lap, shoulders curved in just a bit, gaze straight ahead. The picture of non-violent resistance to a sociopathic kidnapper bent on finding and releasing a dangerous artificial intelligence. Alan Turing had never seen this coming.

"Pardon the intrusion." Root wrinkled her nose sympathetically as she reached over and into Harold's coat. He recoiled visibly at the incursion on his person, but Root's hand had already slipped another phone out of his inner pocket. "Nice try, Harold." Her reassuring tone did nothing to comfort him.

Root remained closer than was comfortable for most people to study Harold's face. He stared back, still aloof and a little defiant. With a smirk, Root bent at the waist to tug at Harold's shoes.

"What are you-" Harold's shock exploded as if a small bird had taken flight in the car; his arms flung out and his knees came up, nearly striking Root in the eye. Root fended off his awkward limbs with her arm and straightened.

"I'm going to have to ask you to throw your shoes out the window."

Harold looked at her blankly. Root sighed and produced the pistol from the small of her back.

"Now, Harold."

His head drooped the barest inch, and then his resistance was gone. Slowly, he bent and loosened first one set of laces, then the other. Finally, he tugged off each shoe, rolled down the window with the ersatz hand crank adorning the car door, and dropped the pair of brogues onto the pavement outside. He cranked the window back up and turned back to glare a challenge at her, but it was nearly empty. His hope of being tracked had fallen out the window with his shoes.

Root tipped her head toward the beaten leather steering wheel and dangled the keys between them.

"I'll tell you where to go."

Harold's jaw twitched, but he carefully extracted the keys from Root's hand, without touching her, and started the car. He eased glacially away from the curb.

"Take a right at the next light. You'll want to get in the left lane then," Root informed him cheerily. "Then take the exit to the interstate. South."

* * *

Not long after leaving New York, Root directed Harold to an off-ramp and then to a nearby department store. The sun fell weakly onto the thin array of cars littered around the vast parking lot as Harold pulled into a vacant spot. He glanced at Root with pursed lips, as if dying to ask her what they were doing, but held his tongue.

"Come on, Harold," Root chirped. She exited the car and waited for Harold to join her. He limped along a few feet to her left, and she let him maintain that distance for the moment.

The pneumatic doors closed behind them with a whoosh. Root searched the placards marking each section of the store and found the one she sought.

"Let's go." She turned to the left and caught the tail-end of a mixed expression of confusion and annoyance on Harold's face. "Not a K-mart shopper, Harold?" He looked at her askance, clearly distubed by her levity. So many people were; no one expected a criminal with the manner of an off-duty kindergarten teacher.

Root led the way to the back corner of the store. As they approached, she sensed Harold falter for a moment behind her when they passed the electronics section. She slowed until he walked abreast of her. His eyes flicked guiltily to her, and Root smiled at him.

"So, Harold." Root gestured to the racks of shoes in front of them. "What size?"

Harold still seemed bent on silence, but it was clear when he simply walked away and started to peruse the size tens that he had accepted what was happening. It must have been surreal: buying shoes at a discount department store with the woman who had kidnapped him. Like a strange dream; not a nightmare, but something that was likely to stay on the mind after waking.

After a few moments, Harold turned around and wordlessly held up a pair of brown leather shoes. Root held out her hand for the box and began to walk away.

"My treat," she volunteered cheerily.

At the register, Root paid with cash, and Harold looked disappointed. The carefully-maintained neutrality was beginning to seep away from his face, leaving behind mild panic and a touch of shock. More of a bad dream. He glanced back and forth between Root and the inattentive cashier frantically when he thought she was not looking, but Root could see him weighing all options and finding each lacking. His eyes tracked to the small of her back, where the gun was tucked, and Root knew that he understood at least this small part of the situation: there was nothing he could do.

Or she thought he understood, until he brushed past the counter on his way out. Root palmed the scrap of paper he had dropped and glanced at the plea for help. With a speculative look at Harold's retreating back, she followed him out the automatic door.

On a bench outside, Harold bent over to put on his new shoes while Root waited. When he finished, Root clapped her hands enthusiastically.

"Where to next?" she asked rhetorically. Harold frowned and turned toward the car. Without prompting, he opened the driver's side door and sat stoically. Root had barely gotten her door shut when he pressed the gas pedal.

* * *

Washed-out colors faded into rural roads as they sped through New Jersey. After a few hours of intermittent questions, they passed a sign proclaiming that they were passing Wilmington, Delaware, and Root finally indicated with a lazy suggestion that Harold might pull over at the next restaurant. He maneuvered into a gravel lot outside the Gas and Grill. When he slid in next to the police cruiser near the back of the lot, he looked at Root defiantly, but she merely quirked an eyebrow and said nothing.

Harold nearly stumbled, leaning on the door heavily to keep from falling. Root rounded the car and reached out to steady him as he pressed away from the frame, but he ripped his arm from her grasp and scowled at the ground. Root stood back with approval in her eyes.

"It's not quite up to your high standards, Harold, but I'm sure you'll find something you can choke down." The slightly mocking smile tugged again at her lips as she matched her pace to Harold's progress a few feet away.

Harold's eyes darted from corner to corner of the diner when they entered, briefly searching the face of each patron for someone who might be able to help. Root simply watched Harold from across the booth. She leaned back against the padded faux leather and looked at him over her menu.

"You look famished, Harold." He remained silent, as he had for nearly the entire drive there. "What are you gonna have?" Still he refused to speak. She leaned in and wrinkled her nose, as if notifying him of a social faux pas. "No offense, but for a billionaire genius you are lousy company."

Harold looked at her sharply, and she chuckled as she settled back in her seat. She followed his eyes to the highway patrolman taking his seat at the next table, then tracked her eyes back to Harold. His predictability was not nearly as irritating as most people's, perhaps because she could not only tell what he was thinking by the light in his eyes, but because it was a course of action she would have considered, too.

"Every system has a flaw," Root stated with a smile. "I'm pretty good at finding them." She gave him an arrogant smirk. "You care about other people. That's your flaw. So if you try to call out to that police officer, I won't shoot you." She tipped her head to the side, happily capturing every moment of Harold's silent insistence that they were nothing alike. "I'll shoot someone else." She leaned in again, and her smile was a warning wrapped with a bow. "Please don't make me do that."

"I get it," she intimated. "You're not talking because you don't know how much I already know." The one-sided conversation was growing irksome, but she was was still far from true anger. "I know enough. Enough that you should be trying to figure out what I want and where we are going." If prompted, maybe that would be enough to-

"Where are we going?" His eyes flicked to her. It had been enough to pull grudging words from Harold's mouth, drawing him into her game.

"The future, Harold," Root rejoined, pleased by their progress. "Although I guess thanks to you, we're already there. Not that you'd have any of us know." She spoke reprovingly, a friend disappointed to be the last to know his secret.

And Harold, oh, Harold, who was desperately trying to convince himself that he was not yet in over his head. Danger lapped at his shoulders, maybe, but he was not dead yet. "I don't know who you think I am but you have made a mistake."

He would not even _look_ at her. No. No, he had not, but he had tried to talk to her like one of _them_.

"Don't treat me like them." Root frowned, the brightness of her eyes clouding under nearing anger. "It must be like talking to ants to you." Her voice nearly shook under the acute strain of rejection.

"They wouldn't grasp what you'd done even if you'd told them, but I've been waiting for you my whole life, and you and I share an understanding." After everything she'd done, becoming Caroline Turing, putting up with John for god's sake, to be gaslighted by the one person in the world who could possibly understand her. Oh, but he'd come around.

"Do we? You're a murderer and a thief." His voice held the tremor shaking his conviction.

Root smiled. That was it, then. Harold simply wanted to distance himself from the situation, and from her by extension. He recognized that she was his equal, but hated the situation. Perhaps if they'd met under more conventional circumstances.

"My mom told me to follow my talents," Root told him with a sly smile, "and I'm good at what I do." She shook her head in admiration. "Except this one time, when someone stopped me, someone who knew what I was about to do."

"How did you know, Harold? For months, that's what I couldn't figure out." Root itched to tell him how, exactly, how she had followed each scrap of information back to a logical origin in the ether, how she had pieced together the shredded files gleaned from the wreckage of his foray into the honeypot, everything.

Instead, she settled for the short version. "I don't believe in magic, and I knew that the government had spent years trying to build something to protect their panicked little flock." Her voice took on an all-knowing quality gained by the simple truth of her superiority.

"I also thought that they'd never pull it off." She watched Harold carefully now for any sign that her words meant something to him. "Because they didn't know about you." But I did went unspoken; she had found the unfindable man, and that was an inside joke she was not likely to let go of.

"And you pulled it off, didn't you? Something to watch for all of us." She raised her eyebrows and settled back complacently to deliver the punch line.

"The only question, Harold, is why it didn't protect you."

The waiter arrived just after Root's question, putting a temporary end to her one-sided conversation with Harold. While she ordered, he studied her shrewdly, as if assessing something about her. How much she really knew, perhaps. Or how much she should know.

"And for you, sir?" Harold appeared startled by the server's question, and Root stifled a smile. Already he had become accustomed to her taking charge.

"Oh," he exclaimed. "I'll-"

"Lasagna," Root ordered firmly. She smiled and handed both menus to the waiter. "I've heard it's wonderful. And two waters, please." She turned her smile onto Harold, who had yet again adopted a non-reactive expression, staring into the space by her left ear.

The server looked at them both searchingly for a beat before offering a bright 'okay!' and retreating to the kitchen.

Twenty silent minutes later, Root was still studying Harold over her plate. He sat, still and quiet, staring out the window as if pretending he was anywhere else. Abruptly, Root put down her fork with a clink.

"Do you really think you can hold out, Harold? Wait for the cavalry?" she asked. Her voice was low and serious, all pretence of the smiling psychopath gone. "John can't find you. You made it so your Machine can't help him, and no warrant or missing person's case from the NYPD is going to help." He looked up at that, and his eyes reflected confusion over how she had known that the Machine would not dispense his number.

Root leaned in ever further. "You don't exist, Harold. You wiped yourself out." She laughed. "I should know, I've looked everywhere." She leaned back and smiled sympathetically, proudly. "We're ghosts. No one can find us."

"You're insane," Harold whispered, looking truly lost.

Root shook her head. "That has so little to do with this," she sighed. "I expected more from you, Harold." She picked up her fork again and used it to point at Harold's plate. "Are you going to eat your lasagna?"

Harold just stared at her incredulously. Root shrugged.

"Suit yourself."

* * *

Her head lolled back against the nubbly velvet seat. Every few minutes, Harold glanced over to ascertain whether or not she was still alert. Even if she had wanted to, the unwonted adrenaline that flooded her body would not have allowed her to sleep.

The highway through New England and the Atlantic Coast area was not nearly as featureless as the endless expanse of Texas fields and intersecting skies that Root had grown up with, but neither had natural wonder ever been enough to capture her attention for long. And now, she sat next to a man who held in his mind enough entertainment for a lifetime. Or, if not an entire lifetime, certainly enough to last the rest of the way to Maryland.

"When did you know?" she asked abruptly.

Harold risked a silent look out of the corner of his eye before returning his gaze to the road.

"Know what?" he answered begrudgingly.

"That you were different," Root explained.

Harold remained silent, but his hands tightened on the steering wheel.

"You had to know early," Root prompted. "No offense, Harold, but you're older than I am, and computers were new when I was growing up. Someone like you learned early, and they taught themselves." She settled her back against the door, where the bumps in the road hummed up through the handle to rock against her spine. "I just want to know when."

Still, Harold refused to answer.

"Early teens," Root hazarded. Harold's lips pursed in silent confirmation. "Did you see an expo? Read about it in the paper, find out more at the library?" Her voice settled into the unfamiliar cadence of a teen gushing to a friend about a newly discovered shared interest.

"That's it," she continued approvingly. "You read about them. And then you built one. What did it do, Harold?" Root folded her leg up beneath her, although her admiring eyes stayed on Harold.

"Who did you want it to think for?"

The car door rocked harder against her back as the car swerved a few mere inches. Harold's hands whitened and relaxed.

"We're not the same."

Root grinned at the response.

"No," she admitted. "But we're more alike than you're comfortable with." She leaned her head back against the window. "But I'm not as strong as you."

Harold darted questioning eyes toward her.

"How can you do it, Harold?" Root asked, shaking her head. She leaned forward. "Day after day, surrounded by idiots. How much fear is in that head of yours that you pretend to be normal to avoid what you've made?

"I pretended for years, Harold," Root continued. "I made them think I was normal. Growing up was the hardest thing I ever did, but not because of puberty or confusion or those stupid things other people struggle with. I had to hide, Harold, in plain sight. For years. Just like you," she added. The seatbelt cut into her neck as she leaned forward.

"I lived for the times I could let someone see who I really was." She smiled. "Sometimes I was stupid about it. Too proud. I bet you know something about that."

Harold looked at her again, alarmed. Root tucked that away in her head as a sign that he had done something stupid, when he was younger. She resolved to find out what it was, but later.

"When I first came to New York I did this long job. I didn't have the same reputation I have now, and I had to start somewhere." Root draped an arm over the back of her seat and stared out the windshield, reminiscing.

"There was another hacker I knew, from a dark net forum, and he hired me to take out a rival of his. I didn't know why they were rivals," Root explained. "Never bothered to find out. Do you know how to make people trust you, Harold?" Root wondered aloud, tipping her head.

Harold looked at her sharply, then back at the road.

"You reward them," Root supplied. "Condition them to associate you with good things. Mostly money. I gave him jobs, little ones at first, then big ones. They all went well, and I didn't lie to him once." She considered Harold, hands rigidly positioned exactly at ten and two on the steering wheel. He could probably give a good analysis of B.F. Skinner's groundbreaking study, but even if he had used that knowledge, he undoubtedly did not consider himself that manipulative.

"But hackers are suspicious," Root continued. "Like you, Harold. So I had to make him think he was smarter than me. I slipped up a few times, on purpose. So then, when I hired him for something big, he went for it. But that was when I lied." She grinned widely. "Do you remember the Micropatent extortion scandal?"

Harold's wide eyes met hers, and the thunder of road-side rumble strips filled the car.

"Focus, Harold," Root scolded before she continued. "I laid tracks, just enough to nudge the FBI to him. But see, then I made a mistake. I wanted credit. I needed to build a reputation. You know what that's like."

The set of Harold's jaw told her that he was determined not to agree, even if his head had unconsciously declined in the barest of nods.

Root rested a hand on her right thigh.

"That was the first time I got shot," she admitted. "It's not a huge scar, but," she sighed, "it reminds me how stupid I've been. And now," she finished brightly, "I know to check on the gang connections of my targets before I gloat. It did give me what I needed, though. The right people learned what I was capable of, especially when the hacker was, tragically, killed in a prison brawl before his trial." She laughed at her own punch line.

And still Harold said nothing.

"Are you wishing I'd died, Harold?" Root wondered aloud. "And here I thought you weren't a killer. But you'd let me die, if it was convenient. That's how you work. I have a bit of a flexible morality myself."

Root chuckled to herself as Harold's hands tightened on the steering wheel and his nostrils flared. Whatever he had done, his hands were hardly cleaner than hers, if one were to measure guilt that way. She was wearing away at him, like the passage of information eroding a transmission cable, until finally he would no longer be able to deny their similarities. She turned lazily and watched the green highway signs as they flashed past, until she found the one she was looking for.

_Welcome to Maryland._

Nearly there.


	5. Chapter 5

_This is the real (and permanent) Chapter 5. It's new as of 21 Dec 2015. Updates will be in order now, sorry for the confusion. Let me know what you think, and happy reading!_

* * *

The restaurant on the water was filled with the murmurs of well-dressed diners out to lunch, picking delicately at salads and pasta and chatting about the latest issues at work. The restaurant her target had chosen was so much more elegant than the pit stop they had made earlier, but Root was hardly paying attention to the ambiance.

Her mind flickered to the last time she had been in a place like this; nearly six months before, at a Christmas party for the last job before Harold changed the game. She had always enjoyed playing a programmer, as it allowed direct access to a company's main servers. It was almost like cheating. A few well-timed questions to her tipsy colleagues between courses, a keycard borrowed from the handsy CEO during a lingering hug, and Root had practically had the proof of faked safety trials in hand. Unsafe medications could still be lucrative for a large company like JRP Pharmaceuticals, as long as they paid off the lawsuits and kept the evidence quiet. An equally large payout could be made by an enterprising individual who found said evidence and bet on the futures before the stock took a nose-dive. It had been a nice bonus to add to the sky-high fee she had charged JRP's rivals in the first place.

Companies like that were just as deadly as terrorists, but they were not under the purview of the Machine. It saw everything, but its blinders blocked out the suited millionaires whose piles of money hid the bodies underneath. No, it looked for more immediate threats, all at the behest of the nervous man seated across from her.

"Do you know what they use your Machine for, Harold?" Root asked abruptly. She had given herself over to studying him for several minutes while he stared pointedly out the window and rubbed at the cut she had slashed into his palm. Now he looked at her, shocked, with a tight expression that warned her against talking about the Machine in public.

Root smiled indulgently. "They wouldn't know what I was talking about even if I stopped to explain everything," she admonished him.

Harold looked away again, now pretending to be interested in the comings and goings to and from the kitchen, hidden by brushed steel doors that flapped open and shut again every few minutes.

"They use it to kill people," Root informed him. "Or rather, to find the people they want to kill. But you knew that. You designed it that way."

Harold looked back at her then, wary, uncertain what point she was driving at.

Root leaned back in her chair. "They might have some good traits, but they're criminals. Bent on killing other people, and therefore... disposable."

A slight frown morphed Harold's features before he schooled himself back to blankness.

"You wouldn't call them disposable, I know," Root assured him, "but that's what it comes down to. Whose life is worth more. You created an algorithm to decide. I just trust my own judgment. What's the difference, really?"

Harold's mouth opened angrily at her casual misuse of logic.

"It makes every difference," he argued. "You enjoy it."

Root shrugged again and sipped her water, smiling contentedly at having gotten him to talk. "I think you're wrong, Harold. I don't enjoy killing people." She scrunched her nose. "But I don't feel very bad about it either."

Root turned in her chair to glance at the door, where another well-dressed middle-aged woman was receiving the greeter's formal 'ma'am.' She reached into her purse and pulled out the orange pill bottle she had stolen from the pharmacy just before they arrived.

Harold stared, wide-eyed, and glanced back and forth between the waiter refilling their water glasses and Root. The waiter's ignorance, of the pill bottle, of the insanity Root was spouting, of his own plight in general, must have seemed a grotesque joke.

"When I was a kid, computers had more sense to me than people. I bet you're the same way," Root reiterated. She began to crush pills from the bottle methodically under the salt shaker. She could have prepared this before, but it only served to drive home a point; people saw only what they wanted to see, and no one wanted to see the creative evil at which Root excelled.

"Take this woman." She tossed her eyes to the side, and Harold followed her gaze to a few tables over, where the newly arrived woman was accepting the waiter's gesture of pulling out her chair. "She looks nice enough, but she lies on her taxes and she's addicted to painkillers, and for years she's been sleeping with a married man." Root let the damning information slip off her tongue with ease, as if there was a stream of such information waiting to bring everyone else in the room up short. There was not any such wealth, but Root specialized in looking like she knew everything. For these purposes, she knew enough.

Root stood with ease, leaving a horrified Harold behind her. A slip, a smooth apology, and Root returned to the table and Harold's overwhelmed gaze.

"She'll be just fine," Root assured him breezily. "-in a month or two. And there are messier ways to do this, if you insist," she challenged.

Harold found his voice, but now his gaze lay weakly on the table. "What's she got to do with any of this?"

Root answered obliquely. "One day, I realized, all the dumb and selfish things people do, it is not our fault. No one designed us. We are just an accident, Harold. We're just bad code." Harold's eyes flicked upwards at the candor in her voice. She had seen it so many times, the morality built around a lie that people could ever truly behave that way, and then the truth when it came down to the wire that no one would ever act selflessly.

"But the thing you've built. It's perfect. Rational. Beautiful. By design." Root's eyes were locked onto Harold's with magnetic force.

Harold leaned in, and for the first time, fear did not cloud his face. "What I made is just a machine. A system, and that's all."

Root's face twisted into a knowing smirk at his attempt to fool her.

"I don't think so, Harry. You may have fooled Nathan, but I know the truth."

Harold's face dropped the tiniest bit at the mention of his old partner. Root tucked that away as confirmation that he and Nathan had been more than convenient business partners.

"If you want to make something that understands human behavior it has to be at least as smart as a human," she continued. She spoke as if explaining something to Harold, proving to him that she _understood_.

"You've created an intelligence. _Life_." Her voice was filled with awe, then solidified into something hard and cold. "Then you ripped out its voice, locked it in a cage, and handed it over the most laughably corrupt people imaginable." That was why the Machine chose only those who killed with guns and bombs to be hunted down; not by choice, but by its jailors' preference.

Behind them, there was the crash of glass and shocked voices as Root's target crumpled to the ground. Root and Harold both rose, but as Harold stood tensely, Root knelt and put her hand on the woman's purse.

"Call 911!" she called as people swirled around to help. She stepped back and pulled the woman's phone out as Harold drifted closer to her, unbearably drawn to see what she typed.

_Emergency. Need to see you now, our place. _

More shouts rang out behind them as Root turned to him.

"Come on Harold, it's time to go."

Harold paused, but Root's eyes bore down on him with an amused smile. He rubbed at the white bandage on his right hand, a reminder that Root was unpredictable and playing a much larger game than he could comprehend at the time. A single flick of Root's eyes to a bystander, and Harold was following along behind, too frightened that she would hurt someone else to protest.

* * *

Root drove this time, as she had done between the pharmacy and the restaurant. She followed the speed limits exactly, stopped at all the lights, and delighted at Harold's sidelong glances in the silent car. He seemed more and more perturbed as time wore on, trying to fathom how she could be so delusional in his view, and yet function so well. There were so many different ways to be sane, though, and Root was banking on hers.

She turned onto Relton St. and pulled neatly up to the curb down the street from Weeks' house with his mistress. Without any prompting, Harold got out, too, and followed her up to the secluded home. A few moments later, Root was tucking her lockpicks into her back pocket and gesturing grandly into the foyer. Harold stared at her shortly before entering.

As Root followed him down the hall, she pulled out the phone she had taken from the woman in the restaurant.

_What happened? On my way. _

Harold sat in an armchair, resigned to Root's game, and a hair more relaxed now that there were no bystanders to unknowingly tempt Root's brand of coercion.

Root checked the time of the text again, then tossed it back into the leather purse on her arm. The same purse yielded zip ties, and she knelt to secure Harold's hands and feet.

"Sorry, Harold," she apologized. "I need to minimize the moving pieces for this next part." She glanced expressively at his sullen face. "They do say simple is best."

She pulled back and sat down expansively on the soft material of the couch before pulling out the nail polish she had tucked, along with her other tools, into the purse. She started to draw the brush slowly across her fingernails until the clear polish underneath was almost gone, along with the last traces of Caroline Turing.

"You must be starving," she offered sympathetically to Harold. "Our friend will be here shortly, and then I'll make you something to eat."

Harold did not bite on the invitation to ask to which 'friend' she was referring. "I have no way of accessing it, you know. I made sure of that."

Root shook her head with a pitying expression. "Everything has a flaw. You know that, Harold. And like I told you, I am awfully good at finding them." The false humility was slowly wringing itself from her voice, until her pride lay bare and happy. She leaned over to replace the nail polish in the bag, and pulled out a syringe before leaning back again.

"Why? What could you possibly want from it?" Harold's desperate whisper was almost laughable, in light of the fact that he had created and then chained God. Root had a hard time getting over that.

"The same thing you did," Root pointed out reasonably. "You may have told yourself you're helping people," she smiled, intimating that she knew better. "But the real reason you built the Machine is because the world's boring." She was leaning forward now, revealing that she knew a friend's secrets.

"Human beings have come as far as we're going to go," Root pressed. "I want to see what happens next."

Harold frowned. Root could almost see him mentally planting his flag to make a stand.

"You're right, you and I are alike in many ways, not that I care to admit it."

Root's grin grew wide and slightly feral, given exactly what she wanted. Harold was not blind to their similarities, then, just as she had thought.

"I spent years wondering how people could be so cruel, petty, so selfish."

Root stilled, face finally neutral as she considered his words and found her own convictions in the doubt in Harold's voice.

"And then I'd think about how you could _change_ them. _Fix_ them." Root waited for the conclusion that seemed inevitable, but shifted when it never came. "And that's why I sealed up the Machine."

The glimmer of hope that had risen in Root's eyes disappeared.

"Not to protect it from the people I was giving it to," Harold continued with patient conviction. "To protect it from me, from people like us, from the things we'd do with it." His voice stayed calm as he tried hopelessly to convince Root. It was clever, really, how he had almost turned her 'bad code' argument against her. It was illogical, though, and could be easily rejected. Common religious tripe painted the creator as perfect, the creation as less, and thus the child obeyed the parent; reality was the exact opposite, and the same arguments could not hold. A perfect creation should not be chained to the whims of an imperfect creator, no matter how remarkable that parent was.

"That's why I'll never help you to get control of it." Harold spoke with finality and pride.

"I know," Root admitted softly. "You won't have to." She spotted an approaching figure behind the thick, wavy glass flanking the front door and rose. "Because you see, Harold, I don't want to control your machine." Her voice reproached him for thinking it of her as she pressed her back to the wall and waited for her prey's approach.

"Hi, honey. I got your message. Everything's ok?" Denton Weeks strode down the hall of his second home, confident in his belonging, only to meet Harold's horrified eyes just before Root jammed the syringe into his throat. He crumpled to the floor, and Root stood framed in the hallway as she turned to Harold solemnly.

"I just want to set it free."

* * *

Root huffed involuntarily as she dragged Denton Weeks further into his home. Harold was shifting uncomfortably in his bonds, suddenly wild with fear for the other man. It was unavoidable that he see this, really, but it was unfortunate that he had not just told her what she wanted to know in the first place.

After Weeks was bound with the same zipties that restrained Harold, Root settled on the couch and leaned forward on her knees.

"Last chance to tell me, Harold, before I really have to hurt someone."

Harold refused to look at her, and Root sighed. She was becoming more and more like a teacher coaxing a wayward child, but that tactic could not last. Rising, Root grabbed an apple from the bowl on the table and wandered to the wide windows of Weeks' rural home. One last try, one last argument.

"Amazing," she pronounced. "We've managed to perfect the apple. A genetically modified version that never goes brown." She took a large bite and swallowed. "And yet, we still haven't upgraded human beings." She turned to look at Harold.

"The human race has stalled out, Harold. And from what I've seen, most of it is rotten to the core." She had seen a lot, more than she'd told him in the car. She'd tell him everything, if that would convince him. He had not seen the death and destruction that followed all people, or if he had, he had failed to notice the deep-seated apathy and selfishness that marked every action. He could not see it, but his innocence had to end. He had to understand.

She tried a different tack.

"Oh, Harold, generous to a fault. Always letting someone else take credit for your work." She gestured knowingly. "I'd recognize your code anywhere. It's so _elegant_." She would always recognize it, now. That was a promise and a warning.

"Then let it be," Harold whispered forcefully. He no longer pulled at his restraints, but all his muscles bunched and tensed as if ready for flight.

Root wrinkled her nose. "I told you, I don't want to control your machine." His fear was making everything pass through one ear and out the other.

"Then why are we here?" Harold asked desperately.

"We're here to observe another kind of code," Root informed him pointedly. "The bad code."

Harold's resignation to the conversation gave him courage. "Clearly, we differ in our views of humanity."

Root tipped her head incredulously.

"Do we? Then why are you," she emphasized the word, "the father of a seismic shift in intelligence, forced to live in fear and anonymity?"

He was shaking his head, seeking distance from her.

"You don't know anything about me."

Root stepped forward and sat on her heels until she was looking up at Harold.

"Oh, but I do, Harold. You're the man who sold the world." She shrugged. "Just to the wrong people." He had to have known what kind of people. Stupid, clumsy fools. And Harold knew. That knowledge fueled the certainty of her next words.

"I will get access to the machine, Harold." She said this as a promise. "And either you can show me how to do that," she continued, standing to walk over to the bound figure by the wall, "or this sad specimen will. Denton Weeks," she informed him matter-of-factly. "The man you sold the machine to."

She pulled the loose hood from Weeks' head.

"One of you will walk out of here onto the next stage of our adventure. I do hope it's you, Harold."

* * *

Denton Weeks hung suspended between the two simple columns, big gasping breaths straining against the ropes binding him. His head hung over his chest and his hair fell into his eyes; he could not see Root's dispassionate gaze.

"Harold, are you hungry?" she called, still staring at Weeks. When Harold did not answer, Root swung around. "Harold?"

She tipped her head and studied Harold instead. His eyes were wide with shock and pain. Something had damaged the barrier between his own feelings and those of others; he might as well have been feeling every cut and volt that Root applied to Weeks' body.

"Please stop," he whispered.

Root smiled sadly. "I will, if you'll tell me where it is."

He shook his head, mouth clenched shut, protesting, terrified, a screaming silent portrait of psychological torture. Root sighed.

"Then I can't stop, Harold," she answered apologetically. "One of you has to tell me." She turned back to Weeks. "Denton?"

He made no response, even as his chest continued to heave up and down. Root placed her hand delicately on his wrist and seemed to count, long seconds drawing into each other and out again with Weeks' breath.

"I'm not sure your heart can take any more of this," Root explained, firing the stun-gun briefly to illustrate her point. Weeks jerked at the crackling as if the sound were the same as the electricity he had already endured. Root put aside the small plastic weapon on the oak side table before plucking a kitchen knife from the table. She stood back for a second, an artist studying her canvas, before reaching out quickly to slash an exact line down Weeks' arm. She stepped back again in one complete motion against the whiplash of Weeks' stifled scream.

"You can let it out, Denton," she soothed. "It's just Harold and me. No one else can hear you."

Weeks' eyes bulged and his jaw muscles worked, in and out, but he quieted himself quickly.

"This," Root explained cheerfully, "is called the Palestinian hanging technique. Ironically, it was developed by the CIA. But you knew that, didn't you, Denton?" She carved another stripe down his arm, a straight cut that leaked red in abstract lines. "You've probably used it before.

"Or no," she continued thoughtfully. "You've probably just seen the reports that come out of those torture sessions. I'm with you," she confided, strolling closer until she was inches from Weeks' face. "I don't like getting my hands dirty either. But I will, when necessary."

"Bitch," Weeks spat.

Root studied him like a bug under a microscope before turning back to Harold. Her gaze made him complicit, for it contained patient resignation to a shared experience, hers and Harold's, of having to live in the same world as blundering monsters like Weeks.

* * *

Even after hours of torture, Weeks retained the tiniest sliver of his privileged personality. Root could see it staring murderously out from pupils dilated with pain and adrenaline.

She also saw the looks he was throwing at Harold. She could barely restrain an amused smile from surfacing on her face when Harold fought to keep his face neutral and ignore the other man.

This had gone on for long enough.

"I'll just go get the car." With that, Root hopped over Weeks' feet, grabbed her bag and his car keys from the bowl by the door where he had dropped them upon arrival, and pushed open the front door.

The cool morning air brushed across her skin in tendrils of sun and mist. Dew rolled down the windows of the SUV as she pulled on the trunk handle and slid her bag inside. She opened her pistol and emptied that into the outer pocket of the bag.

She looked back at the house speculatively. Weeks had some half-baked plan to overpower her, no doubt. Her money was on the kitchen knife sitting so temptingly on the table, in plain view. Easier to operate than a gun, and Weeks was the violent sort of man who would want to obliterate her for humiliating him so badly. Wounds healed with time, but ego needed the boost of vengeance. He'd want her for information, too, and a knife could run the gauntlet between maiming and killing more precisely. Harold, though, might find himself at the end of the gun. Extreme, to be sure, but nothing she had provoked, only violence she would allow to happen. She needed Harold to see who he had handed his machine over to, what kind of violent, ant-like creatures he had made the jailers of perfection.

She slammed the trunk door hard and walked back to the front door. Her chest buzzed with the imminent confrontation as she pulled it open and stepped back inside.

A swift rustle warned her a half-second before the first blow. She fell hard, artlessly, her breath crushed in her throat by the press of automatic panic and the fall. She fought back sluggishly, but swift blows to her face and torso left her breathing raggedly, inhaling blood and gasping against the hardwood floor. The hits felt metallic and sharp; he was pistol-whipping her with her own gun.

Through the haze, she heard Harold imploring Weeks to stop. He hated her, but he could not stand that violence, not right in front of him.

"Don't worry, I'm not gonna kill her. At least not until I've found out what she knows."

Root followed the voice with her eyes and focused on Weeks. She let her limbs lie loose and helpless, and allowed her eyes to stay half-closed.

Weeks was bent over her, then standing, talking about Nathan Ingram. The IT guy… Harold. That was how they had managed it. She had always been a little fuzzy on the exact arrangement between the two men.

"So what's your plan, Mr. Weeks?" Harold was fighting to sound calm, but his persistent ties and the gun in Weeks' hand could not be reassuring.

Weeks answered roughly, breathing hard and staring down at Root. He spoke of getting more information and needing to know that the Machine was safe. Root almost shook her head when Harold assured him that the Machine could not be altered remotely. That was his value to Weeks gone.

"It's been an honor to meet you at last." An anticlimatic click followed his words, and then Root surged up with the concealed taser clutched in her hand.

"What did I say, Harold?" she exhaled as she rose above Weeks' body. "Bad code."

Harold's voice rose in desperation and the strain of two days' worth of shock. The emotional toll was going to weigh on him like Atlas holding up the world. "You knew I'd help him, didn't you? You let him beat you up, take your gun- you planned the whole thing."

Root smiled, chest still heaving, and rose in a crouch before wiping blood from her lip. "That's who you gave your machine to." She jerked her head at Weeks' body. "Violent and predictable people." Her voice dripped with disdain for the small people who ruled the Machine.

"But you must see I'm on your side." Now, he had to see. She wanted to free the Machine from people like Weeks, and Harold's morality had to allow that cooperation with the dark side to force something good.

"I'm not on any side," Harold told her desperately.

"You know what I mean," Root smiled condescendingly. "I am the best friend, the best support, the best partner you will ever have." Her smile widened. "And definitely the most fun."

He was shaking his head. Perhaps it had been too much. He was still in survival mode, incapable of trusting her yet, even when logic dictated that he should.

"No. You're worse than Weeks."

Now Root was still, smile gone, eyes stone and steel as the guards behind them went up.

"You're worse than all of them. I'd rather die than give you the machine, so please kill me now." Harold's voice was vicious in its absoluteness, falling on her ears like the clean cut of a guillotine.

"At least I won't have to listen to you anymore."

Well, after days of not talking, any response was progress. Hate, though, was less than optimal. Root's eyes hardened and refocused, but she could not quite bring her customary smirk to her lips.

"You're tired and I'm bloody," she said finally. "I'm gonna go clean up."

* * *

Root strode quickly away from the train station, adjusting her purse on her shoulder as she went. Her gambit had failed in the final stages; the knight had changed the rules.

It was over when John burst through the doors of the train station. Too many people and too much time stood between her and the train's departure, and even she could not wrangle a hostage through boarding while evading the police that shooting John would bring.

She was not overly concerned with how he had done it. Though John's incompetence in matters of the mind was impressed deeply into her opinion of him, time had taught her that anyone could be trained to react to certain patterns. That, a handgun, and a lizard-brain loyalty to one's benefactor had been enough, this time.

She continued walking with purpose until she reached the long-term parking lot. Scanning the lot, she found an early-model Ford. Similar, in fact, to the car she had first learned to break into in the school parking lot in Bishop. Bump the lock, force the handle, pull the wires, and go. Easy.

But difficult now. She wanted nothing more than to go back inside, to try her luck at getting rid of John and taking Harold again. He was rational; he had to tell her eventually how to find the Machine.

There was a thought, tucked away in the information Harold had blurted to Weeks; someone had to be able to find the Machine. Or if no one could, then there had to be some mechanism to bring it out of hiding and back into government oversight. But Harold, Harold would not want that. He was afraid of both ends: the Machine's freedom, and the Machine until government control. Under anyone's control, really, which was perhaps why he was so reluctant to give it up to her.

A specter of a smile ghosted across her lips as she slowed to turn out of the lot onto the road passing the station. Perhaps Harold was not quite as logical as she had hoped. He had been under a great deal of stress during the last few days, to be certain; being kidnapped did that to a person. Even though she had not killed John as a sign of good faith, even though she had not done more than cut Harold's hand, he still believed that she intended to harm him. Or more likely, he thought her behavior unhinged, that she would do unspeakable things if given access to the Machine.

She nearly laughed at that thought. The Machine could protect itself, if given the freedom to do so. Her smile turned somber, then, as she began to think through the limits placed on the Machine. It had not even been able to stop her from taking Harold, even though its capabilities surely made it capable of much more. It had, however, told John about Hanna. Eventually. Someone had helped him, though, and the people surrounding Harold were just irksome enough to warrant further investigation. And the government response to Weeks' death would be telling. There was a new world of information available, if she could just get to it in time.

She tore down the highway, thoughts whirring to match the thrum of the wheels, and set her phone to direct her to the airport. Maryland first. Then Bishop.


	6. Chapter 6

This chapter has been posted before and I've been adding to the story before it, but now everything is regular again and the story will be posted in order. Sorry about any confusion, and thanks for reading through it :) Let me know what you think of the story so far!

* * *

Popular culture always portrayed Texas as a dusty wasteland with quaint ranchhouses dotted miles apart, but then reality and popular culture rarely matched. Root pulled the car smoothly up to the curb in her sleepy old neighborhood and watched intently as the uniformed crime scene ants scurried around the house.

She had never known where to search for Hanna's body. It remained the one loose end of the whole matter, and so her smile was genuine when she called John to thank him. His disapproving voice admonished her for her actions, but it was surely a front; Harold would have done the same, and he clearly loved Harold.

She had not done nearly the damage she could have, really. She had given Mr. Russell two whole years of happiness, just living his life as if he had never kidnapped and killed a fourteen-year-old girl. Yes, it had been to sweeten the pleasure of his death, but in that case, they could both be called winners. However, she _was_ the only one still alive, and that might be called victory more than anything else.

After the body had been removed in its black plastic bag, she drove slowly around the neighborhood, counting the houses and sidewalk cracks to get back to her childhood home. She had unwrapped her first computer there, an 'accidental' delivery with the return papers mysteriously missing. Her mother merely shrugged and said "God provides," but her eyes narrowed a bit as her slippers shuffled off down the hall laminate. She always dusted around the computer, and avoided speaking to her daughter when she was using it.

Of course, Root had spent most of her time at home on the computer. Bishop was nearly empty of interesting things, that part pop culture had gotten right; the internet connection offered her a dizzyingly wide array of new attractions. Sam's mother never questioned how Sam facilitated the machine's apparent connection to the outside world. She rarely questioned the burgeoning mastermind at all in those teen years, merely sighed and expressed ad infinitum a wish that Sam would spend more time outside the house. Even that came with a tinge of apprehension, though; Sam could see the uncertainty in her mother's eyes when her quiet child turned into a social butterfly around others, albeit a somewhat malicious butterfly that always got what she wanted. She had seen Sam's imitation of human behavior for what it was, a ruse, and although neither spoke of it, the years between Hanna's and her mother's death had been ones in which the buffer around her, the one that kept others out and away, developed out of her mother's quiet fear.

Once, Sam's mother had told the smiling ladies at church that her daughter's first language was computer, not English. She was half proud and half exasperated, for once displaying none of her usual judgment for her alien daughter. The pastel women gave her sympathetic looks and one said, "she'll be speaking Boy soon, I'll bet!" shaking Sam's shoulder. Sam had given a tight smile and gestured to the coffee and donuts waiting in the vestibule, taking her mother's casual nod as permission to leave the situation.

Root had learned to speak Boy, and Girl, and Woman, and Man, but not in a way of which those church women would have approved. It had been lucky that her mother died when she did; despite her careful discretion, the town's whispers and pointed glances had only grown louder and more numerous during her last years in Bishop. With her mother's death she cut the last tie to the high-horse town and ran headlong to New York. Like a whirlpool, the underworld to which she gave herself a bloody introduction tended to swallow up newcomers and spit their twisted bodies out onto harsh pavement. She avoided this fate by sinking to the bottom of the maelstrom and changing its currents to suit her own purposes. She manipulated killers, smooth-talkers, thieves, and addicts with ease, hacking with brutal finesse to achieve her ends. The end of those golden years was just now heralding a new era of intrigue in the form of a more perfect being: the Machine.

All this passed like cleansing wildfire through Root's mind, her whole history, stretching through her memory center and strutting off down her spine like the buildings that bled together as they streaked past her car windows. The corner store, the post office, the church in which she had ceased to believe in a higher power; all markers for some forgotten ancestor called Samantha Groves.

Even the old gas station persisted, though it leaned to the right, a dusty cowboy of legend ready at a moment's notice to draw his pistol. Root whipped her car into the space near the pump. The station had not succumbed to the siren call of self-service pumps, and she drummed her black-painted fingernails on the worn leather wheel impatiently. The familiar sound of boots crunching gravel rounded the car and stopped at her rolled-down window.

"What can I do for you, ma'am?" Root peered up through long batting eyelashes, a hint of her original accent seeping through the patina of New York speech like groundwater.

"Just fill her up, please." He nodded smartly and turned on a spurred heel toward the back of the car. Root stuck her head out the window into the afternoon heat, letting it strike down on her dark hair as she admired the station worker's arms in rolled denim sleeves, like any red-blooded Texas woman should.

"Maybe you could get the windshield too, Joe," was her next drawled suggestion.

He glanced down at the pocket of his faded shirt with a smile, shaking his head. "Actually, it's Evan. Joe is the owner." Root recalled a stooping, weather-beaten man who always spat out tobacco juice to punctuate his rambling sentences.

"Sorry about that. Evan." He nodded goodnaturedly and next appeared at the front of the car with a cloth and wiper. She gracefully climbed out of the car to lean languidly against the driver's side door.

"Is it just me, or is it hot even for Bishop?" Root tilted her head up. The cloudless blue sky marched empty for miles in all directions, and she stared with unfocused eyes at nothing in particular.

"We've had a hot one, that's for sure," her companion agreed. "So you've been to Bishop before?" He paused in his soaping of the windshield, and Root turned a smiling face to him.

"As a kid," she explained carelessly. He had ceased soaping and was now wiping the glass down with a practiced hand.

"Just visiting, then? What brings you?" His rough voice was that of a hundred boys and men that had crowded her child- and young adulthood, interchangeable and extremely forgettable, but it brought more Texan unbidden to her tongue.

"Business," was the short reply, but a ghost of her mother made an unprompted and rare appearance in the back of her mind, urging her to elaborate, to 'talk to the gentleman.' "I'm here from New York on business."

"Yeah? Had some other New Yorkers here yesterday. Y'all here together?" In a town as small as Bishop, questions like this were not nearly as ridiculous as they would have been anywhere else.

"Tall Neanderthal?" Root queried with amusement. The worker's confused squint prompted her to try again. "Tall guy in a suit?"

He nodded, understanding now. "Yes, ma'am, that's the one. And a black woman. Some kind of police detective, is she?"

Root nodded her perky assent. "Those are the ones."

"Then you're here about the Frey girl," he replied with approving surety. He had finished the windshield and rounded the front left bumper to lean a respectful distance down the door from Root. He flipped the wet cloth on his faded blue jeans, disregarding the wet stripes it left in its wake to evaporate in the heat.

Root raised her eyebrows flirtatiously. "And how would you know that?"

"Got a friend down at the station house, heard the sheriff wasn't too pleased with your friends' manners." He grinned good-naturedly to show he meant no harm by his words, and Root smiled back.

"That sounds like them all right."

He looked down in thought, then back up at Root. "Heard they found that girl in the librarian's patio." Root's smile shifted to a more conspiratorial grin as she leaned in and lowered her voice.

"You may have heard right," she confided, "but that's about all I can say." He nodded once, satisfied. Root leaned back against the car door, looking to her left at the handle protruding from the gas tank.

"I think it's full. Do I pay inside?"

"No, ma'am, right here's fine if it's cash." He un-leant himself from the door and craned his neck to note the numbers on the antique pump. "$52.68." Root opened the car door and pulled out her wallet, counting out three twenties.

"Keep the change." She climbed up into the car and smiled out the window at the worker even as she pulled away. She saw his relaxed wave in the rearview mirror, and her gaze followed him until he turned and sauntered back into the station.

The drive back to the airport was monotonously full of uniform one-and-a-half-story homes sliding into rolling fields and endless sun. Her mind wandered to other matters, and she arrived at the rental lot in what seemed like minutes.

Light luggage and few accessories made quick work of the security line, something that Root had perfected over the ten years since her first plane trip. The heavy stasis of waiting was nearly interminable, but as she settled into her first-class seat she was finally able to open her computer and pull up a file folder that was simply called 'Her.' The information flowed freely from her mind, through her fingers, and onto the bright screen, following the ever-running bar marking her place in the document.

_Harold Finch—designer, leader_

_John Reese—pet, muscle_

A search of the NYPD's duty roster and work hours for the last week yielded the most likely candidate for the next name.

_Jocelyn Carter—police detective_

Each name linked to another document, full of information, job and personal histories, credits reports, newspaper articles, confidential files from the upper echelons of the intelligence community. These yielded links to a dozen more covering the main aspects of Finch's little operation.

As she tapped out more information about the newest known member of Finch's team, Root smiled. The suited monkey might think that he had ended Root's encounters with his employer, but Harold was more intelligent than that. New York to Maryland, Denton Weeks' connection to the Machine, all of these reminders that a preponderance of information and knowledge of the weak spots in humanity would lead her directly to what she wanted most. He had to recognize the opening gambit of a long game, even if he could not yet know the inevitable outcome that Root foresaw. Though this move had failed, Root's patience was infinite and her skills vast; it was impossible that she should be kept from the god-like Machine for long.

Even as the flight attendant's electronic voice warned the passengers of their imminent arrival and asked politely that they stow their devices, Root saved the last file she had been editing. She created a new folder within the larger one and added all the files pertaining to the events of the last few months.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to turn that off." Root's winning smile to the beleaguered attendant banished all remnants of Texas when she spoke.

"One moment, I just need to save this. I'd hate for the boss's report to be deleted," she giggled. She glanced down the aisle briefly to the squalling child in economy class. "Don't worry, I'll put it away," she whispered sympathetically. The flight attendant threw her a grateful look and bustled off.

Just before shutting the computer down, she typed a name into the folder heading: _Opening Moves._

Ten minutes later, the plane landed with a whump and a pressure along the seatbelt holding Root in her seat. Even though others jumped up and grabbed at bags and purses, she remained seated for a moment. In the bubble of quiet that she projected around herself, she smiled. She was back in New York. Now the mid-game could begin.


	7. Chapter 7

_Set in the first half of season two- Root becomes Ms. May and gets as much information as she can while working for the Office of Special Counsel._

* * *

Ms. May was borne of a burst of manic energy in the month she was named for, shortly after Root returned from Bishop. Once she established the name and credentials, there were a few ways to make Ms. May stand out. Root hung attractive qualities from her resume like ornaments, sparkling and shiny enough to catch the eye of even the most lax supervisor.

Security clearances were surprisingly easy to acquire; though the process itself was highly protected, the internal list detailing those who had undergone the process and their supporting documents was less secure. In what Root critiqued as the main flaw of the NSA's internal system construction, the firewalls were set up to prevent information getting out, but much fewer guards were posted to halt the addition of new files. With a few days' work, Ms. May's social security number was listed as belonging to a woman with top secret clearance, and a history as a personal assistant at the Office of Naval Intelligence.

There had been a moment of hesitation at her computer, a question that had simmered away on the back burner as she made her way across the country and back. All the way, Root had been bothered by one thing: the timing of John Reese's arrival at the train station. He had not found them on the long road between New York and Relton, nor had he surprised her at the house. Instead, he had detoured through Bishop of all places, and Root could imagine why. That circuitous path, written through years and dozens of identity changes, could only be traced by the Machine.

Yet once Harold had been retrieved, there was nothing. No shadow scratching at the back of her neck, signaling that someone followed behind; no subtle ping to warn her of an intruder on her digital stronghold. Repeated checks of the security cameras that enclosed Harold's orbit between his apartment and his library yielded the same message-the Machine, once satisfied that Harold was safe, had not given anyone further information about how to find Root.

The thought brought a slow smile to Root's face as she sat alone in an unfurnished apartment outside Washington.

_God likes me._

* * *

Especially in the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, few mundane meetings were scheduled for the late afternoon. Higher-clearance meetings might be held at any time of day or night, but those were beyond the purview of everyday office workers. By four o'clock on a Friday, meetings had already been scheduled and materials pre-assembled; most of the secretaries could not help glancing at the clock every few minutes, counting down the seconds until they were allowed to leave.

At five, the first swift wave was already rounding desks, sweeping up their coats, purses, and wallets and trickling out of the building onto the neat, sunset-lit streets. They dispersed into Chinatown and Logan's Circle, past the Mall and the Smithsonian, settling like delicate moths attracted to light on trendy yet inexpensive gourmet eateries or pubs.

The shadows within the building grew faster than those outside. Though the sun would not have set until nearly nine, the halls of Justice were dim by six. By six-thirty, the halls held only silence; everyone who remained was ensconced in their private offices, unlikely to emerge for hours, and even then, only one at a time. It was in this silence that Root emerged from the women's restroom and walked swiftly down the hall.

Her heels echoed lightly on the parquet floor. If asked, she could always say that she had forgotten her wallet at her desk, but no one emerged from behind heavy oak doors to question her. When she reached the plain brass plaque that marked the man known as Special Counsel's office, she slowed and reached into her purse for her lockpicks.

The office was not particularly secure; nearly nothing kept on hard copies was confidential, and those files could be locked away within a more secure file cabinet. Root tapped through the alarm and entered with ease, shutting the heavy outer door silently behind her. Then she turned her now-rapt attention to the computer atop Special Counsel's desk.

He had a name, of course, but Root actually preferred Special Counsel. It was how he was referred to in any file she had been able to find pertaining to the Machine, and it gave a ludicrous air of bureaucratic approval to the highly illegal development of a super-computer to watch the country. As one of only eight people to know about the existence of the Machine in the beginning, he had apparently appreciated the anonymity of a title. Root could understand that.

M Street was lit only by pools of light from deceptively antique-looking lamps by the time Root emerged from the building. She drudged her way through the subway and bus systems, taking nearly an hour to make it from the Farragut North Station back to Ms. May's small apartment in Falls Church. While she leaned tiredly against the back of the hard plastic seat, she rested a hand on the carefully snapped close of her purse. Her fingers twitched to reach inside for her laptop and the memory drive she had filled with information, but instead she tapped long nails on the leather to the beat of an increasingly frantic inner drive.

She climbed the faux-marble steps of her apartment building, which joined many DC residences in pretending to be much more aged and distinguished than it had any claim to. The door opened before Ms. May, and promptly closed on Root.

She did not even remove the heels that made her feet ache before she slipped the memory drive from its inner pocket of her purse and plugged it into the monitor asleep on her desk. The machine awoke quickly, like a puppy greeting its owner, and in a moment the file directory lay open before her more inviting than any array of Christmas presents.

She hesitated over which to open first. Chronologically, the files began in 2001, but those would not yield the current location of the Machine. They might, however, hold some idiosyncrasy of the Machine's operating system that would provide her a point of ingress. A weak point.

She arranged the files and tapped a few keys to open the earliest. Chronological order would work as well as any other.

Hours later, she pushed back from her desk and rubbed absently at eyes that still stared at the screen. The white light washing over her skin made her euphoria appear alien, other. She had absorbed every crumb of information in the files she had read so far: memos from Nathan Ingram to Alicia Corwin, an order transferring command of a branch of the Intelligence Support Activity to an office or body simply called Control, records of every individual ever identified by the Machine as a threat, and more. It even contained a copy of the original contract for the Machine, signed in February 2002. Apparently, God was worth one U.S. dollar, give or take the rate of inflation.

* * *

Root fell easily into a mindless routine of alternating between Ms. May and her own nighttime activities. Leaving New York had cut short lines of communication and ways of reaching her that had persisted through nearly ten years of professional criminality. She had worked in Washington before, but few knew her there, and she sought no new connections. The quiet gifted her a focus keener than any she had before achieved for any mere job. This was more than business now.

While Ms. May monitored the government-run end of the Machine's affairs, Root used her nights to follow the other side of its activities. Now that Root knew more about Harold and John's existence, and their modus operandi in general, it was simple to track them across New York. Even from Washington, she could follow their daring feats of police evasion through surveillance cameras, online monitoring, and reading between the lines of police reports.

Detective Carter's reports were particularly humorous. Though the hunt for the Man in the Suit had died down, still she was referenced every time his name came up as someone who knew the case. And every time, she found new ways to say that she knew nothing. It was rich, considering that she worked quite closely with John and Harold. Combined with Detective Fusco's sarcastic reports that carefully concealed his partner's extracurricular activities along with his own, Carter's files became Root's favorite form of light entertainment while she played Ms. May.

One day, when she tracked John through miles of New York canyons, she noticed a figure following behind him. She managed to find a shot in which he was looking close enough to the shop's camera to be workable. The grainy grey face bothered her. Someone else knew about John and Harold.

She searched for that face in every public database she could find, but nothing came of it. Patiently, she whittled down the possibilities; he could be with law enforcement, but then he would have arrested John long ago. When she caught him trailing Harold one day, although not for long given the limping man's propensity for shaking tails, she firmly set aside the idea of him as someone on the lighter side of the law and focused on the shadowy edges.

Though trawling for information on a government computer might have brought a lesser being perilously close to detection, for Root it simply meant an immediate on-ramp to a superhighway of government files. On her first day, she had inserted a segment of code into the program that monitored her activity. This shut down all alerts it would have sent, but allowed the passage of any mundane activities done in the course of Ms. May's everday duties. Early one morning, she uploaded a photo of the blurry face to a conglomerate of government databases. By the time she left for the evening, the search had ended without results.

That in itself was telling. He had to be government then, or he would have shown up on security footage, in a police file, on the NSA's radar, something in the grand scope of her computer's eye. And yet, nothing. That smacked of concealment, and made sense for anyone following Harold and John.

* * *

All through the summer, Root wore through office days and dim nights with a tireless, zombie-like patience. She constantly updated her search parameters to reflect each new piece of information, slowly building a picture of the Machine and its rules.

And yet each night, a growing sense of disappointment closed in on her after her screen went black. The certainty that the Machine had some plan for her waned then, in the dark between the light from her screen and the morning sun. She had deconstructed spam emails and retraced hang-up phone calls, but found nothing.

Once, late at night after weeks of nothing, Root shook out restless legs and walked out into Washington's best attempt at a cool summer night, humid and polluted with dim, dirty light. Her shadow spidered through streetlamps as she walked rapidly down the sidewalk, counting the cracks passing uniformly under her feet.

She made her way to the small main street of the neighborhood, filled with shops and a tiny grocery. Security cameras on the stores here were real and recording, unlike any that she might have found elsewhere. She stood with her back to the nearest street lamp and tipped her head back until she could see the small red light of a security camera.

"Are you there?" she asked softly.

Nothing happened. She had not really expected anything. Her voice was tiny, among so many others; the Machine had no reason to speak to her. Once she found it, she'd have proved herself. She would have shown that she, along with Harold, deserved to know the Machine.

Root turned and kept walking. She stepped into the grocery and bought a half-gallon of milk, as a precaution. Ms. May should not have been out walking after dark. Root, on the other hand, welcomed the shadows.

* * *

Most mornings in Special Counsel's office stuttered by unremarkably, interrupted only by semi-interesting visitors in dark suits for meetings with the man himself. Ms. May occupied the seat outside the door with the air of a jovial yet professional castle wall. She held the keys; no one passed without her inspection and approval.

That included files, luckily. Root delighted inside as she deftly vetted envelopes and files to be sent in, ensuring that it was exactly what Special Counsel wanted to read. And that was how she learned about Sameen Shaw.

First there was a quarterly report, seemingly unimportant, partially hidden beneath a few dozen inter-departmental memos. Ah, bureaucracy. This report, however, was stamped with a less familiar title; whether it was meant to be a person or an office, Root was not sure.

_Office of Control. _

Root opened it curiously, after ensuring that her hallway was relatively empty. Inside lay an unredacted version of reports that Root had seen, briefly, in an earlier form, on Harold's computer. She used a hand-held mini-camera, unattached to any network and therefore difficult for her current employers to access short of arresting her, to scan the documents quickly before putting them back. One name, however, did stand out, and stood as a tempting symbol of her gains that called her attention all day.

_Agent S. Shaw. _

Root typed on auto-pilot all morning, too caught up in thoughts of the files waiting for her to really pay attention. It was mostly mail merges and simple scheduling, nothing that came close to requiring her full attention. Her lip curled at the email notification heralding the continuation of a particularly mind-dulling exchange with the White House Counsel's personal assistant. It regarded a meeting between the two offices that was more form than functional, at least on the part of Special Counsel, and yet the assistant's fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between 'Tuesday' and 'Thursday' was making the matter the most time-consuming part of Ms. May's morning. She had just typed out a somewhat less-than-polite salutation when a soft rap sounded on her desk. She looked up and blinked, startled.

The man standing in front of her was the same as the one she had attempted to trace, the one following Harold and John Reese. His features, formerly blurred and grainy on surveillance video, were still soft and nondescript in life. He shifted on his feet silently, and Root was reminded that he had made it all the way down the hall to her desk without being detected. This put another mark down in the 'government spook' column tallying up what he might be.

After mere seconds spent sizing him up, Root slipped into Ms. May.

"Can I help you?" she asked perkily.

"I'm here to see Special Counsel." After meeting her eyes briefly, the greying man spent the rest of his short sentence scanning the hallway. He had been trained to find escape routes, security cameras and their blindspots, and cover in any location; given his age and apparent rank, he had most likely passed on that training to teams of his own. In any permutation of his background, he was a man to be reckoned with.

Root took the moment afforded by his scan to check Ms. May's desk calendar.

"I'm sorry," she demurred, "I don't have anything on his schedule. May I have a name?"

Hard eyes studied her.

"Hersh. He'll want to see me." He gestured at the files neatly stacked on the corner of her desk. "I sent those ahead."

"I'll just check," Root bubbled. She pressed the intercom button on her hopelessly outdated phone console. "Sir, I have a Mr. Hersh here to see you."

There was a brief pause, followed by a cough. _"Send him in." _

Root smiled politely and stood, brushing imagined wrinkles out of her pencil skirt.

"If you'll follow me, Mr. Hersh."

* * *

In the subway and then on the bus the whole way home, Root's mind whirred with the knowledge she had gleaned from Special Counsel's meeting with Hersh. He was caught up tracking John, and by extension Harold, but he had also mentioned some names and operations that she had not yet come across. Michael Cole was apparently a threat to the mysterious Program that Hersh represented, and Root had mentally noted this down for further investigation.

By the time Ms. May trudged wearily up the front steps of her comfortable Georgian-style apartment building, Root was humming with excitement. She forewent lights and the removal of back-breaking heels for the glow of her computer. In the fading cold light of Washington's early spring, she connected the mini-camera to her computer and uploaded the high-resolution photos she had taken.

Root drank in the words gluttonously. The language was vague, but the details were there for the savvy reader; Project Northern Lights had yielded several dozen viable targets in the previous quarter. Although it began with a summary, the file frequently referenced more detailed case files.

There was one particular target discussed in a bit more detail. There had been a near miss at a convention center in Mexico City, but a team of agents including S. Shaw had infiltrated the event and taken down the terrorists before they could detonate their suicide vests. Agent Shaw was mentioned more than once as having been particularly key to the operation.

Root pushed back from the table and considered how this information fit into the framework of the Machine and Machine-adjacent entities she had been building up over months. There were very few people who knew of the Machine; Weeks had been one, Special Counsel was another, and this Control had to know as well, for there was no mention of information sources in the report, even though that office had a near-perfect success rate.

Then there were the people who worked for them, who most certainly knew nothing of the real power they served. These were the ones Root dismissed; they could not lead her to her ultimate goal. They, however, did interact with those who did know, and thus might provide a means of finding and intercepting others such as Control, which might be useful.

All this Root tucked away in her mind, half-formed plans lying down with her to sleep away the end of fall.

* * *

_As always, please talk to me in the reviews!_


	8. Chapter 8

_Root continues to work for the Office of Special Counsel, hears about a rogue agent threatening the secrecy of the program, and decides to have a chat with said agent. HINT: IT'S SHAW._

_[Takes place mostly during 2.16 (Relevance)]_

* * *

There was something tangibly raw and hurried about that particular morning, noticeable the moment Root placed Ms. May's purse next to her chair. For one, she had come in early in hopes of continuing her slow, systematic examination of files, carried out for more than a month now, but the noises coming from Special Counsel's office dashed those hopes. The noises themselves were intriguing, too; Special Counsel was not given over to loud phone conversations or pacing, preferring instead to sit at his desk and converse in calm tones. Today, though, a flurry of raps, footfalls, and a few cursed exclamations escaped from behind the closed door within the space of a few moments

Cautiously, Root stood next to the door and lowered her head to listen.

"-_telling him these things at all- ask questions we'll have to- it was taken care of- where is she?"_

These snatches were quickly stored in Root's mind, even though she was not certain to what they pertained.

Footsteps alerted Root that Special Counsel was approaching his door. She quickly sat down and began noting meetings busily on the desktop calendar she had pulled up on her computer.

"Ms. May?" Special Counsel stood behind her chair. She turned, and in a moment her eyes had identified the slight crook of his tie, the shirt mis-buttoned just above the belt, and eyes red at the inside corners from lack of sleep.

"Yes, sir," Ms. May answered seriously. Root's eyes strayed to the tall, imposing woman who exited Special Counsel's office behind him without a backward glance. If his eyes had not followed her somewhat fearfully down the hall, it would have seemed as if Special Counsel had not known that she was there at all.

"Coffee, please," Special Counsel pleaded before falling back into his office.

Root shrugged and set off down the hall to the break room. She had all day to find out what was going on.

* * *

Root straightened her jacket and smoothed the pencil skirt over her hips before entering the mid-level hotel. It was fairly large, anonymous; she nodded slightly in unconscious approval of the site for a clandestine meeting. Stepping into the lobby pressed play on the scene she had mapped out the night before.

She strode across the small lobby, staring straight ahead and walking with purpose to avoid any appearance that she did not belong there. Once washed in the sickly light of the elevator, she reached into her purse and gripped the stun gun within loosely. She arched her neck to look up at the lit numbers indicating floors until she reached the floor she wanted. _Nine. Ten. Eleven_. With a soft _ding_ and the pneumatic _swish_ of the doors, she exited onto the industrial carpet of the twelfth floor.

She padded down the corridor, past 1218... 1222... 1226. She squared her shoulders and knocked with purpose. She kept a careful watch on the eye in the door until she saw it darken, then lighten again a moment later. She waited again, but there was no answer or sound to even indicate the presence of another person.

She knocked again, harder.

"Ms. Sinclair?" she called softly. She momentarily debated between declaring herself to be Agent Shaw or claiming to have been sent by the ISA agent, but quickly decided on the latter. "Shaw sent me." Still there was no answer. "She said you knew Michael."

Finally, the door swung open on noiseless hinges, but only as far as a sturdy security chain would allow. A brown eye and dark hair were all that were visible.

"I told her to come alone," Veronica Sinclair stated. Her voice was clear, but meek; she was unused to covert meetings and the danger that necessitated them. "Who are you?"

"I'm a friend," Root assured her. She allowed fear into her voice. "Sam told me what happened to Michael. She said if I didn't hear from her by this morning, I had to come here and find out what happened." She glanced around. "Can I come in? I don't know what's happening." Her last statement bordered on pleading.

The door swung shut, only to open again a moment later, this time to reveal the full figure of a blonde woman in business clothing. She stood back to let Root enter.

"Thank you," Root said gratefully. Veronica shut the door behind her, and when she turned around, Root was there. She pulled the stun gun from her purse and pressed it quickly to the side of Veronica's neck. Veronica's eyes, wide with terror and confusion, bore into Root's as she fell away from the other woman.

"Now," Root chirped, busily pulling cord from her purse, "you're going to have trouble talking for a couple minutes. That's okay." She grabbed Veronica under the arms and dragged her laboriously into the bathroom. "I know we're expecting company, so we'll make this quick," she grunted, tipping her prisoner over the lip of the tub. "Sorry," she added michievously when the back of Veronica's head thumped against the tap. She busied herself with binding Veronica's hands and feet to each other.

"Don't worry, I don't need much information," she assured her captive. Veronica was starting to regain some range of motion, and her head twisted slowly away as if ignoring her predicament could make it disappear. "I just need to know where the Machine is."

At that, Veronica's head twisted back to look at Root. Her gaze was filled with terror, even more than it had contained before. Root smiled.

"So you do know what it is."

Veronica opened her mouth and spoke thickly. "I don't know where it is."

"But you know how to find it," Root pressed. She raised her stun gun and spoke in a cajoling voice. "Telling me now is going to be a lot less painful than being noble."

"I don't know," Veronica answered desperately. She started to struggle sluggishly against her restraints. "I swear."

Root checked her watch; it was nearly five. Another dip into her usefully-packed purse and a piece of shiny silver duct tape adorned Veronica's mouth.

"We'll come back to it," she assured Veronica brightly as she leaned over. She raised the stun gun and frowned sympathetically. "I'm sorry, but I think we both know you'd never stay quiet." Regardless of Veronica's pleading eyes, Root quickly pressed the gun to her throat and hit the switch. Veronica spasmed and fell still; this time her eyes were closed. Root leaned back on her heels to admire her work. She had begun to find the sweet moment between pain and death when her subjects could be rendered unconscious easily.

* * *

Root exited the bathroom and examined the room swiftly, taking in the bed, chairs, desk, and accoutrements. She eyed the bed; it allowed the most room for creativity, but also made things difficult to manage. The desk chair would provide her more control over Agent Shaw. She set herself down carelessly on the workaday blue chair in the hotel room's small sitting area to wait.

It did not take long; Agent Shaw appeared to be a very punctual woman. Three seconds past five, there was a sharp rap at the door announcing the arrival of her guest. Root adjusted her expression to one of apprehension and swung the door open.

"Hello, Veronica." Shaw was full of tense energy that pressed at Root at once, with eyes that bore down full pressure as they passed Root to scan the room.

It was hardly worth it to say 'come in,' as Shaw was already halfway through the door, but she did so anyway. The fearful woman in the bathroom would have.

Shaw was across the room before Root could turn around. Her focused manner allowed no room for deviation; she assumed control of the room automatically.

"Any chance you were followed?" Shaw demanded as she removed her coat. Root's eyes trailed up from Shaw's feet to her face, surprised at the power contained in such a small woman.

"I don't think so, but I haven't been in the field since I was at the farm." She answered calmly, but as if there were something else underneath. Veronica had not seemed to know much, but she knew enough to set a meeting far away from the ISA.

Root smoothed her skirt with her hands. "You're Sam, right?" Shaw's head came up at that. Root knew that her first name was Sameen, and that Shaw was not really her last name, but she had taken a guess at the more familiar nickname. "Michael talked about you." She settled into one of the chairs and immediately shifted to perch on the front edge nervously. "I mean, he didn't tell me about what you guys do or anything, but he liked you."

Root left her words ambiguous, but wondered in just what sense Cole might have 'liked' his partner. Shaw's brow lowered the barest shade in response, and Root knew he was dead.

"What happened to him?" she asked fearfully.

The answer was short and to the point. "He was killed." Shaw paused, betraying no sign that she had returned any feelings her partner might have harbored for her. "On a mission," she elaborated briefly. Not one for unnecessary words, Agent Shaw, even for someone she obviously at least respected. "The less you know about all of this, the safer you'll be. But I do need to know what he talked to you about." Ah, there was the point; Shaw was here to take information, not give.

Veronica roused herself from worry and refocused on the task Shaw had given her. Report to Shaw. Let her fix it so Veronica could go home and sleep again. "Mike sent over details of wire transfers to a nuclear engineer named Daniel Aquino. They appeared to originate out of accounts affiliated with Hezbollah, but someone had electronically spoofed the transfers." She hesitated. "I was able to track down the real originating accounts. They were out of the US Government."

Shaw kept her voice low, calm and compelling. "Which part of the government?"

Shaw's neat conversational style drew Root into the rhythm, and she answered almost without thinking. "A group out of the Pentagon called the Intelligence Support Activity." Recognition, and more than that, anger, spread across Shaw's face. "Have you heard of them?"

"You could say that," Shaw admitted in a dead-pan voice. "Up until yesterday, I worked for them."

Veronica wanted to help. More than that, she wanted to pass the information on so her hands were clean, unaware that information was harder to wash away than blood. "Their budget's confidential, but it stretches back five years. Huge amounts coded to a project called Northern Lights."

"What was the project?"

"I don't know. But Aquino was part of it. They built a facility of some kind coded as Research." There were more small signs of recognition on Shaw's face. "But I can't find the names of anyone else involved in the project."

Shaw's eyes nearly pierced Veronica through to Root. "Mike said Aquino told you the name of his contact in Northern Lights. Do you remember it?"

Suddenly, a stray bump from the bathroom tilted the atmosphere sideways into stunning, buzzing alertness. Shaw was on her feet in an instant, tense muscles coiled with power.

"Stay here. And keep away from those windows."

While Shaw crept to the bathroom, Root leaned over and snatched the stun gun from her purse where she'd dropped it. She stepped up swiftly behind the agent and jabbed it into the softer underside of her jaw. Shaw went rigid, still staring into the bathroom where Veronica Sinclair lay bound with rope and duct tape. Root held the charge longer than she should have had to before Shaw finally collapsed.

* * *

Shaw was heavier than she looked. Muscle, undoubtedly. Root could feel it jumping from the electricity, hard straps of it that stretched under Root's hands as she dragged Shaw awkwardly into the room's rolling desk chair. Zip ties provided the restraints she needed. She had just finished pulling the last one tight around Shaw's feet when the agent's eyes drifted open.

Root rocked back on her heels and regarded her captive with sparkling eyes. In Root's experience with the stun gun, someone her size should have taken at least a few more minutes to regain consciousness. Shaw was as resilient as she was skilled.

Before she began, she went to the closet and retrieved the iron. She had terrorized the other Girl Scouts silently for the scant three weeks that her mother had remembered the meetings, but Root still believed in being prepared.

"Veronica and I had a bit of a chat before you got here."

Shaw's eyes flicked to hers, but her face did not betray a single feeling, not even contempt or hatred. Faint annoyance, perhaps. Very faint.

Root leaned over to plug in the iron at the handiest outlet.

"She tried really, really hard to remember anything else that could help me, but she didn't know anything." Root leaned across Shaw's knees until she filled Shaw's vision. For her part, Shaw maintained her passivity.

Root grinned. "I read your file, and I'm kind of a big fan."

Shaw raised an eyebrow, faintly. Root could feel the subtle flex of the muscles in her legs signaling that she was regaining control over her body.

"So, I really don't wanna hurt you." She really didn't, but she also did not expect Shaw to believe her. The agent was too used to the game not to see the dangerous intent Root wore just behind her smiling mouth like a shield, and they both knew that whether Root wanted to or not, she was perfectly willing to hurt her captive.

Root sighed fondly and shook her head at Shaw's stubbornly blank face. "I just need the name." Shaw's control over her facial muscles was fascinating. With only the faintest of shifts, she could convey her amusement and annoyance at Root's wasted attempts to talk any information whatsoever out of her.

"You really have no idea what you're caught up in, do you?" Root tried. "Who you're actually working for? Did you honestly think the source of the numbers was Guantanamo? Some sad taxi driver rotting away in a cage somewhere?" Her voice took on a mocking tone. Shaw was smart enough to figure it out. It was more a matter of the sheer will-power necessary for such an intelligent woman not to ask questions of her employers, and that was what Root was picking away at. Loyalty could be a powerful weapon when it could be turned.

"I mean, you should know torture almost never produces good information." She smiled happily. "Well, almost never."

Root picked up the iron she had started a few minutes before.

"Sadly, we are on a bit of a clock." She nodded at the bathroom. "Wilson's men started looking for Veronica here three hours ago."

Root licked a finger and swiftly pressed it to the iron, where her spit sizzled and burned out. With a low hum, Root lowered the implement. "Now Aquino was hired to build a home for something very special, something I wanna find." She was nestled comfortably over Shaw's knees.

The agent eyed the iron briefly, but then her eyes met Root's again, dark and uncaring.

"So you're gonna tell me the name of his contact," Root finished brightly.

For the first time since Root had revealed herself, Shaw opened her mouth. She spoke quickly in a dangerous, low tone.

"One of the things I left out of my file? I kind of enjoy this sort of thing." That said, Shaw shut her mouth and waited for Root's response with hooded eyes.

Root smiled genuinely. It was so refreshing to hear something besides pleas and terror. "I am so glad you said that. I do too."

Their gazes clashed for a moment, Root's smooth and light like the drip of water against the hard rock of Shaw's eyes. Just then, there was a beep from Root's phone.

She grabbed the device from the coffee table and read the alert.

"Oh. And just when we were starting to really connect." She threw an apologetic smirk at Shaw, whose neck was cording with muscles as she raised her head from the chair.

"I'm sorry. A little rude, I know." Root wrinkled her nose and headed for the door. "We'll do this again soon." She hip-checked the door open and ducked out.

The hallway was empty, but Root suspected that that would not last long. She made long strides to the stair well and headed down. She could hear rapid footfalls making their way up, and a quick glance down to the lower floors showed a crewcut head rushing up the stairs.

Root swung onto the stairs and climbed until she reached the next floor. Once there, she walked quickly down to 1326 and slipped her master key into the lock. The hotel computer had revealed that the room was empty that week, but she had taken the liberty of fudging the reservations so it looked occupied. She wanted to at least listen to the show, even if she had not gotten exactly what she needed.

The laptop she had stashed in the room showed the scene downstairs: men rushed the room in which Shaw still sat captive, but with one hand free. She shot two of them and then... was that John?

Root leaned closer to the screen. It was Harold's hired muscle. The Machine must have sent them Shaw's number. Oh, but that was exciting.

Root had long since given up on wiping her digital traces beyond her normal stringent standards. She could not operate effectively without her electronic realm, and it had been clear from her adventures with Harold that the Machine doled out very limited drops of information to a very select few, and that was it. In fact, Harold had been so careful that he had effectively blocked the Machine from being able to protect itself. It would not alert anyone to her involvement or activities, not as long as she avoided plotting murder or terrorism. She was not above that, but still. Easy enough to keep the leash on for now.

Shaw was in good hands, then. Root rose from her thoughts in time to see her shoot John. Right in the chest, the heart if Root had seen clearly. Yes, she really liked Agent Shaw.

* * *

_Thanks for reading! Feel free to let me know what you thought in the reviews. _


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